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HANS  HOLBEIN 
THE  YOUNGER 


OF  THE 

L'N:v!:r:c!TV  of  \ii^o\s 


HANS  HOLBEIN 
THE  YOUNGER 

A  CRITICAL  MONOGRAPH  BY 

FORD  MADOX  HUEFFER 


CHICAGO  NEW  YORK 

RAND,  McNALLY  &  COMPANY 


PRINTED  IN  GREAT  BRITAIN  AT 
THE  BALLANTYNE  PRESS 
LONDON 


LIST  OF  PHOTOGRAVURES 

Facing  p, 

HENRY  VIII.  Chatsworth.  Frontispiece 

SKETCH  FOR  PORTRAIT  OF  MEIER'S  WIFE.   Basle.  24 
Photograph,  Braun,  Clement  ^  Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
New  Tork 

sp. 

^OLEFIN'S  PORTRAIT  OF  HIMSELF  [PUTATIVE],  Basle.  32 
o         Photograph,  Braun,  Clement       Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
<      New  Tork 

CM 

^HE  DEAD  MAN  [HEAD  ALONE].   Basle.  40 
Photograph,  Braun,  Clement       Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
Z         New  Tork 

ST.  ANNE  WITH  THE  VIRGIN  [DESIGN  FOR  GLASS]. 

Basle.  42 

Photograph,  Braun,  Clement  ^  Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
New  Tork 

CHRIST   BEARING   THE   CROSS   [LATER  PASSION 

SERIES].   Basle.  44 

Photograph,  Braun,  Clement       Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
New  Tork 

THE  KNEELING   KNIGHT  [DESIGN   FOR  GLASS]. 

Basle.  46 

Photograph,  Braun,  Clement  ^  Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
New  Tork 

5 


349750 


LIST  OF  PHOTOGRAVURES 

Facing  p 

PORTRAIT  OF  A  MAN  [CALLED  SIR  THOMAS  MORE]. 

Brussels.  56 

Photography  Hanfstaengl 

STUDY  FOR  THE  MEIER  MADONNA.   Basle.  58 

Photograph,  Braun,  Clement       Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
New  York 

THE  MEIER  MADONNA.   Darmstadt.  60 

Photograph,  Braun,  Clement       Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
New  Tork 

BISHOP  STOKESLEY  OF  LONDON.   Windsor.  64 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

ARCHBISHOP  WARHAM.   Windsor.  66 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

THE  GODSALVES.   Dresden.  66 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

SIR  HENRY  GUILDFORD.   Windsor.  68 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

ROBERT  CHESEMAN,  THE  ROYAL  FALCONER.  The 

Hague.  68 

Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

SIR  BRIAN  TUKE.   Munich.  70 

Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

ERASMUS  [MINIATURE].   Basle.  70 

Photograph,  Braun,  Clement  iff  Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris,  and 
New  Tork 

6 


LIST  OF  PHOTOGRAVURES 

Facing  p. 

GEORGE  GISZE,  MERCHANT  OF  THE  STEELYARD. 

Berlin.  72 

Photograph,  Braun,  Clement  iff  Ctg.,  Dornach,  Parts,  and 
New  Tork 

A  MERCHANT  OF  THE  STEELYARD.   Windsor.  72 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

JOHJSf  CHAMBERS,  THE  PHYSICIAN.   Vienna  74 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

HENRY  VIII.   Windsor.  74 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

JANE  SEYMOUR.   Vienna.  76 

Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

ANNE  OF  CLEVES.   The  Louvre.  76 

Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

DERICK  BORN.   Windsor.  '  76 

Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

CHRISTINA,   DUCHESS   OF    MILAN.    The  National 

Gallery,  Lond-on.  78 

Photograph,  Braun,  Clement  ^  Cie.,  Dornach,  Paris^  and 
New  Tork 

ROBERT  SOUTHWELL.   The  Uffizi  Gallery.  80 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

THE  DUKE  OF  NORFOLK.   Windsor.  80 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

7 


LIST  OF  PHOTOGRAVURES 

Facing  p. 

PORTRAITS  OF  MAN  AND  WOMAN.   Vienna.  82 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

THE  AMBASSADORS.   National  Gallery,  London.  82 
Photograph,  Hanfstaengl 

THE  SIEUR  DE  MORETTE.   Dresden.  84 

PORTRAIT  STUDY  FOR  RESKYMER  OF  CORNWALL. 

Windsor.  86 

PORTRAIT  STUDY  OF  THE  LADY  PARKER.    Windsor  86 


8 


I 


DURER  and  Holbein  :  Holbein  and  Diirer  : 
the  two  for  most  of  mankind  stand  up  like 
lighthouses  out  of  the  sea  of  Germanic 
painters  that  one  knows  barely  hy  name  or  that  one 
may  know  perhaps  fairly  well  by  their  works.  There 
are  Martin  Schongauer,  Burgkmair,  Conrad  Vitz, 
Hans  the  German,  Nicolas  the  German,  the  Upper 
German  School,  the  Unknown  Masters,  and  how  many 
more  ? 

It  is  at  least  convenient  roughly  to  consider  in 
one's  mind  that  the  two  greater  masters  are  for  the 
Germanic  nations  the  boundary  stones  between  the 
old  world  and  the  modern,  between  the  old  faith 
and  the  new  learning,  between  empirical,  charming 
conceptions  of  an  irrational  world  and  the  modern 
theoretic  way  of  looking  at  life.  Diirer  stood  for  the 
great  imaginers  who  went  before.  He  seems  to  sum 
up  the  Minnesingers,  the  Tristan  cycles,  the  great 
feudal  conceptions.  Holbein  commences  the  age  of 
doubts,  of  merchants,  of  individual  freedoms,  of 
broader  ideals,  of  an  opening  world  and  new  hopes. 

Of  course  the  moment  one  begins  to  consider  the 
facts  of  the  case  very  closely,  the  differences  grow 
less  and  one  sees  that  the  two  great  peaks  are  part 
of  one  and  the  same  chain.  But  the  differences  are 
convenient  pegs  on  which  to  hang  one's  arguments, 
and  these  one  may  emphasize  first.  Holbein,  for 
instance,  was  a  fresco  painter.    But  the  fresco  painters 

9 


HOLBEIN 

who  went  before  him  were  decorative  workmen. 
Their  frescoes  were  either  subservient  to  the  archi- 
tecture (that  is  to  say,  they  were  frankly  decorative), 
or  at  least  they  filled  in  spaces,  they  aided  the  architect. 
For  the  coming  of  Holbein  it  was  necessary  that  archi- 
tecture itself  should  disappear.  He  demanded  parallel- 
ograms— as  it  were  canvases  set  up  before  him  on  which 
to  paint  pictures.  Thus  the  house  became  a  square 
box  with  as  few  as  possible  square  windows.  So  it 
remains  to-day. 

Holbein,  again,  painted  decorations  straight  on  to 
his  pictures.  That  is  to  say,  he  painted  on  his  canvas, 
his  panel,  or  his  paper  either  a  frame  of  Renaissance 
cherubs  and  grape  vines,  or  he  introduced  into  his 
subject-compositions  exotic  decorative  architecture  of 
a  Renaissance  style.  In  this  of  course  he  was  a  long  way 
from  coming  first.  The  Renaissance  influence  had 
come  upon  him  as  a  child  in  his  father's  studio  :  the 
habit  of  painting  decorative  {i,e,  not  realistic)  back- 
grounds to  historic  subjects  had  existed  long  enough 
before.  Thus  in  a  series  of  Biblical  and  historic 
subjects  Conrad  Vitz,  a  Suabian  painter,  who  died  in 
Basle  in  the  first  half  of  the  fifteenth  century,  paints 
the  figures  of  Abishai,  Julius  Caesar,  or  Joachim  with 
an  astonishing  realism ;  they  march  before  flat, 
gilded,  and  patterned  walls  which  represent  Bethlehem, 
the  battlefield  of  Pharsalia,  or  the  landscape  behind 
the  Temple  of  Solomon.  That  Conrad  Vitz  did  this 
we  may  put  down  rather  to  his  lack  of  ability  to  paint 
battlefields  or  landscapes  than  to  any  decorative 
leanings.  He  simply  hung  up  a  cloth  behind  his 
figures  as  did  the  Elizabethan  actors  who  in  front  of 
their  blank  wall  displayed  the  legend,  "This  is  the 
Palace  of  the  Capulets,"  and  left  the  rest  to  the 
imagination  of  the  spectator. 

Hans  Fries,  however,  a  Freiburg  painter  of  the 

lo 


HOLBEIN 


generation  immediately  preceding  and  overlapping 
that  of  Holbein,  did  actually  paint  perfectly  realistic 
pictures  :  he  then  superimposed  right  across  the  top 
of  the  landscape-background  thin  decorations  derived 
from  Renaissance  vine  patterns  in  brownish  red. 
Through  the  interstices  one  sees  mountains,  trees, 
figures,  and  what  not.  Thus  alike  from  his  father 
and  from  his  age  Holbein  drank  in  the  spirit  of  the 
Renaissance  in  its  Germanic  form. 

From  his  father  he  inherited  a  gift  far  more  valuable, 
a  gift  that  has  survived  the  Renaissance  itself,  a  gift 
that  leaves  Holbein  still  far  enough  ahead  of  the  most 
modern  of  the  moderns — a  gift  of  keenly  observing  his 
fellow-men,  and  of  rendering  them  dispassionately. 
And  indeed  I  am  tempted  so  far  to  digress  from  my 
immediate  line  as  to  interpolate  the  remark  that 
medisevalism  stands  for  the  love  of  outdoor  nature, 
whilst  the  Renaissance  revelled  in  the  human  form  and 
in  natural  objects  conventionalized.  "  Convention- 
alized "  means  humanized,  your  decorator  taking  an 
acanthus  leaf  and  treating  it  so  arbitrarily  that  it  will 
fill  any  space  on  the  inside  or  the  exterior  of  a  human 
dwelling-house.  Holbein,  as  far  as  we  know,  cared 
comparatively  little  for  what  to-day  we  call  Nature. 
He  was  the  painter  of  men  and  cities,  and  inasmuch  as 
modern  life  is  a  matter  of  men  and  cities,  he  was  the 
first  painter  of  modern  life. 

His  landscapes  are  very  few  and  not  very  significant. 
The  one  that  most  immediately  occurs  to  one  is  that 
in  the  design  of  Death  and  the  Ploughman  in  the  Dance 
of  Death  series.  On  the  other  hand,  his  renderings 
of  interiors,  of  implements,  of  carpets  and  musical 
instruments  are  not  only  innumerable,  they  are 
instinct  with  that  pure  love  of  the  objects  themselves 
that  Diirer  gave  to  his  renderings  of  landscapes. 

The  life  which  Diirer's  art  seems  to  close  was  an 

II 


HOLBEIN 

out-of-door  life,  or  at  least  it  was  a  life  that  was  passed 
outside  of  great  cities.  His  lords  ride  hunting  in  full 
steel  from  small  castles  on  ragged  and  rather  Japanese- 
looking  crags ;  his  Christ  upon  the  Mount  of  Olives 
kneels  beside  a  stunted  crag  ;  his  Samson  slays  the  lion 
in  a  Rhineland  landscape. 

The  flesh  of  his  figures  is  hardened,  dried,  and 
tanned  by  exposure  to  the  air  ;  his  whole  conception 
of  the  external  world  was  more  angular,  more  as  if 
in  early  youth  he  had  got  into  his  mind  that  feeling 
of  rocks,  of  broken  trees,  or  of  a  luxuriant  vegetation. 
When,  as  in  the  Melancholia  design,  he  renders  imple- 
ments, tools,  shaped  stones,  and  other  symbolic 
objects,  he  renders  them  not  because  he  loves  them 
for  themselves,  but  because  they  are  parts  of  his 
design. 

Holbein's  lords  no  longer  ride  hunting.  They  are 
inmates  of  palaces,  their  flesh  is  rounded,  their  limbs 
at  rest,  their  eyes  sceptical  or  contemplative.  They 
are  indoor  statesmen  ;  they  deal  in  intrigues  ;  they 
h^ve  already  learnt  the  meaning  of  the  words,  "  The 
balance  of  the  Powers,"  and  in  consequence  they  wield 
the  sword  no  longer  ;  they  have  become  sedentary 
rulers.  Apart  from  minute  differences  of  costume, 
of  badges  round  their  necks,  or  implements  which 
lie  beside  them  on  tables — differences  which  for  us 
have  already  lost  their  significance — Holbein's  great 
lords  are  no  longer  distinguishable  from  Holbein's 
great  merchants.  Indeed  the  portrait  of  the  Sieur  de 
Morette  has  until  quite  lately  been  universally  regarded 
as  that  of  Gilbert  Morett,  Henry  VHPs  master- 
jeweller. 

Holbein  obviously  was  not  responsible  for  this 
change  in  the  spirit  of  the  age  ;  but  it  was  just  because 
these  changed  circumstances  were  sympathetic  to 
him,  just  because  he  could  so  perfectly  render  them, 

12 


HOLBEIN 

that  lie  became  the  great  painter  of  his  time.  Diirer 
was  a  mystic,  the  last  fruit  of  a  twilight  of  the  gods. 
In  his  portraits  the  eyes  dream,  accept,  or  believe 
in  the  things  they  see.  Thus  his  Ulrich  Varnhuler^ 
Chancellor  of  the  Empire^  a  magnificent,  fleshy  man, 
gazes  into  the  distance  unseeingly,  for  all  the  world 
like  a  poet  in  the  outward  form  of  a  brewer's  drayman. 
The  eyes  in  Holbein's  portraits  of  queens  are  half 
closed,  sceptical,  challenging,  and  disbelieving.  They 
look  at  you  as  if  to  say  :  "  I  do  not  know  exactly  what 
manner  of  man  you  are,  but  I  am  very  sure  that  being 
a  man  you  are  no  hero."  This,  however,  is  not  a 
condemnation,  but  a  mere  acceptance  of  the  fact  that, 
from  Pope  to  peasant,  poor  humanity  can  never  be 
more  than  poor  humanity. 

It  is  a  common  belief,  and  very  possibly  a  very  true 
belief,  that  painters  in  painting  figures  exaggerate 
physical  and  mental  traits  so  that  the  sitters  assume 
some  of  their  own  physical  peculiarities.  (Thus 
Borrow  accuses  Benjamin  Robert  Haydon  of  painting 
all  his  figures  too  short  in  the  legs,  because  Haydon's 
own  legs  were  themselves  disproportionately  small.) 
One  might  therefore  argue  fromx  the  eyes  of  Holbein's 
pictures  that  the  man  himself  was  a  good-humoured 
sceptic  who  had  seen  a  great  deal  of  life  and  took 
things  very  much  as  they  came.  On  the  other  hand, 
Diirer,  according  to  the  same  theory,  must  have  been 
a  man  who  saw  beside  all  visible  objects  their  poetic 
significance,  their  mystical  doubles.  But  perhaps 
it  is  safer  to  say  that  the  dominant  men  of  Diirer's 
day  were  really  dreamers,  whilst  those  who  employed 
Holbein  were  essentially  sceptics,  knowing  too  much 
about  mankind  to  have  many  ideals  left.  For  Holbein 
flourished  and  Diirer  was  already  on  the  wane  in  the 
days  of  the  Humanists  and  of  the  New  Learning.  And 
was  it  not  that  bitter,  soured,  and  disappointed  Duke 

13 


HOLBEIN 


of  Norfolk  whom  Holbein  painted  like  a  survival  from 
the  olden  times,  standing  up  rigid  and  unbending  in 
a  new  world  that  seemed  to  him  a  sea  of  errors — ^who 
had  been  a  great  captain,  to  become  later  a  miserable 
and  trembling  Catholic  politician  in  a  schismatic 
court — was  it  not  that  Duke  of  Norfolk  who  first  said  : 
"  It  was  merry  in  England  before  this  New  Learning 
came  in  "  ? 


I 


II 

HANS  HOLBEIN  the  younger,  the  son,  the 
nephew,  and  the  brother  of  painters,  was 
born  in  1497-98  in  Augsburg,  a  town  in  those 
days  world-famous,  in  which  there  flourished  not 
only  the  spirit  of  commerce,  but  the  spirit  of  adventure 
and  the  spirit  of  the  arts.  Its  great  merchants 
travelled,  the  first  idea  of  the  New  World  across 
the  water  having  already  reached  them  ;  the  Fuggers 
were  there  ;  Peutinger  had  been  to  Italy  unnumbered 
times,  and  it  is  even  recorded  that  his  four-year-old 
daughter  could  make  a  speech  in  Latin  upon  such 
state  occasions  as  when  the  Emperor  visited  the 
city. 

There  were,  moreover,  great  monastic  establish- 
ments, great  convents,  and  great  churchmen.  It  was, 
in  fact,  Augsburg,  a  world-city  in  the  modern  sense 
of  the  term  ;  not  only  was  it  prosperous,  but  under 
the  influence  of  the  commerces  and  the  cultures  of  a 
newly  awakening  world,  it  was  growing  almost  as 
rapidly  as  the  great  modern  cities  began  to  grow  in 
the  opening  years  of  the  nineteenth  century.  It  was 
constantly  visited  by  the  then  Emperor  Maximilian, 
who  brought  with  him  in  his  train  more  men  of  great 
learning,  of  great  influence,  and  of  great  taste.  Small 
wonder,  then,  that  the  plastic  arts  flourished. 

They  flourished  because  in  the  first  place  there  was 
what  we  call  nowadays  "  a  great  demand,"  and  in 
the  second  place  because  the  new  influence  that  was 

IS 


HOLBEIN 

abroad  in  the  world,  the  new  leaven,  a  sort  of  new 
impatience,  the  eternal  aliquid  novi  ex  Italia  which 
exercised  and  always  exercises  so  potent  and  so  dis- 
turbing an  influence  upon  the  Germanic  races — this 
great  new  impatience  that  we  call  the  Renaissance 
had  set,  in  Augsburg,  all  sorts  of  fingers  itching  to 
do  great  things  with  the  reed-pen  of  the  scholar, 
the  brush  of  the  painter,  the  style  of  the  engraver. 
There  was  in  Augsburg  a  Painters'  Zunft,  a  sort  of 
painters'  and  glaziers'  guild,  that  had  offered  to  it  as 
much  work  as  its  members  could  well  compass.  It 
had  its  own  Guild  Hall  in  the  market-place,  where  its 
members  could  meet,  discuss  and  learn  from  the  new 
wood-engravings,  the  new  printed  books,  and  all  the 
new  things  that  came  to  them  so  plentifully.  The 
members  of  this  guild  designed  windows,  decorations 
for  houses,  dagger-sheaths,  and  costumes  for  pageants. 
Those  of  them  who  were  more  purely  painters  painted 
sacred  pictures.  Stations  of  the  Cross,  Apotheoses, 
and  scenes  from  the  lives  of  patron  saints  of  the  great 
abbeys.  When,  a  little  later,  the  Emperor  took  up  a 
nearly  permanent  residence  in  Augsburg,  he  employed 
not  only  most  of  the  Augsburg  painters,  but  many 
foreign  artists,  even  Diirer  himself,  to  make  historical 
and  religious  designs  for  him. 

The  father  of  Holbein  was  a  member  of  the  Zunft 
and  no  doubt  enjoyed  a  certain  share  of  the  patronage 
which  fell  upon  it.  But,  if  we  may  hazard  inferences, 
he  was  not  among  the  most  popular  of  the  painters  ; 
he  was  not  employed  by  the  Emperor,  though  his 
comrade  Hans  Burgkmair  worked  along  with  Diirer. 
He  seems,  however,  to  have  had  his  fair  share  of 
religious  paintings  to  execute.  Thus  in  St.  Catherine's 
Convent  towards  1509  he  painted  the  Basilica  des 
heiligen  Petrus,  beside  Burgkmair's  Basilica  des  heiligen 
Kreuzes,  Nevertheless  the  few  records  that  we  have 
16 


HOLBEIN 

of  his  life  in  the  town  records  in  Augsburg  point  to 
the  fact  that  he  was  in  chronic  poverty.  Thus  he 
was  frequently  more  than  a  year  in  arrears  with  his 
town-rates  ;  he  was  sued  for  butcher's  meat.  And 
the  last  sad  record  that  we  have  of  him  was  that  his 
furniture  was  sold  at  the  suit  of  his  brother  Sigismund 
Holbein  for  non-payment  of  a  small  debt. 

Perhaps  we  may  comfort  ourselves  with  the  thought 
that  he  was  ahead  of  his  time.  The  few  pictures  of 
his  still  extant,  such  as  the  St.  Sebastian  in  Munich, 
show  him  to  have  been  a  painter  of  no  small  skill 
and  an  observer  of  the  very  highest.  And  the  mar- 
vellous collection  of  portraits  of  his  comrades  and 
colleagues  in  his  sketch-book,  now  in  the  Berlin 
National  Gallery,  is  in  no  sense  inferior  to  the  Windsor 
Castle  series  of  sketches  for  portraits  of  his  son.  There 
are  the  same  firmness  of  line,  the  same  perfection  of 
drawing,  the  same  intense  individuality,  the  same 
free  and  consummate  putting  of  a  head  on  paper, 
and  an  even  greater  insight  into  character.  One  is 
tempted  to  theorize  too  far  ;  but  it  would  seem  as  if 
the  comparatively  obscure  father  had  had  granted  to 
him  by  reason  of  his  misfortunes  a  greater  sympathy,  a 
greater  insight,  as  if  by  tribulation  he  became  more  of 
a  poet  than  his  son  who  grew  prosperous  and  had, 
as  was  the  lot  of  painters  in  those  days,  the  cities 
and  the  potentates  of  the  earth  contending  for  his 
favours. 

His  sympathy  for  Renaissance  decorations  appears 
to  have  been  a  zest  as  childlike  and  self-abandoned 
as  that  which  his  son  showed  in  his  early  years.  And 
it  is  probable  that  this  taste  rather  than  much  actual 
skill  in  painting  was  all  that  Holbein  the  younger 
learned  directly  of  his  father.  He  inherited,  however, 
his  father's  temperament,  to  which  he  added  an 
incomparable  skill  in  painting  that  was  all  his  own. 

B  17 


HOLBEIN 

When  he  was  seventeen,  or  eighteen  at  any  rate,  he 
left  his  father's  house,  and  eventually  reached  Basle 
towards  15 15. 

He  made  his  wander-year  apparently  with  his  elder 
brother  Ambrosius,  himself  a  painter  of  no  mean  order. 
Of  where  they  went  we  have  no  trace,  but  that  they 
did  not  come  straight  to  Basle  is  apparent  enough. 
For  in  15 14  a  Domherr  of  the  Minister  at  Constance 
ordered  from  him  a  Madonna  and  Child,  which, 
after  having  lain  undiscovered  until  1876  in  the  village 
of  Rickenbach  near  Constance,  is  now  in  the  Holbein 
Collection  at  Basle. 

This  charming  and  naive  little  picture  shows  us 
what  were  the  attainments  of  Holbein  when  he  had 
left  his  father's  studio  and  had  not  yet  come  under 
the  influences  that  were  then  to  be  felt  in  Basle.  He 
painted  it  probably  in  payment  for  his  lodging,  or 
received  in  return  a  few  small  coins,  just  as  wandering 
organ  repairers,  wandering  tailors,  shoemakers,  and 
tinkers  have  in  Germany,  for  so  many  centuries  since, 
kept  themselves  going  from  town  to  town,  picked  up 
a  knowledge  of  the  world,  and  learned  new  secrets  of 
their  crafts.  It  shows  us  a  Holbein  who  was  already 
at  seventeen  a  consummate  Renaissance  decorator. 
The  little  cherubs  who  climb  upon  the  painted 
frame,  who  blow  instruments,  who  offer  votive 
tablets,  the  painted  frame  itself,  and  the  garlands  of 
laurel  leaves  which  hang  down  behind  the  Virgin's 
head,  these  are  done  with  a  perfectly  sure  touch  and 
a  wonderfully  grasped  knowledge  of  what  it  is  possible 
to  do  with  conventionalized  babies'  figures.  But 
the  moment  the  boy  came  to  paint  the  real  baby  in 
its  mother's  arms  he  grew  timid,  uncertain,  and  what 
nowadays  we  call  "  amateurish."  The  head  is  too 
large,  the  eyes  out  of  line,  and  the  flesh  painted 
with  a  curious  little  woolly  touch.  The  conception 
18 


I 


HOLBEIN 

and  pose  of  the  Madonna  are,  as  I  have  said,  naive 
and  tender,  and  the  feeling  of  the  whole  picture  is 
excellent.  It  is  mostly  perhaps  in  the  feet  of  the 
Christ-child  that  v^e  see  any  foreshadowing  of  the 
great  draughtsman  and  the  great  realist  that  he  was 
subsequently  to  become.  So  equipped,  then,  did 
Holbein  leave  his  father's  house.  He  had  learned 
what  it  is  open  to  most  boys  of  genius  to  learn — the 
attractive  and  perhaps  flashy  conventionalities  that 
were  available.  Possibly  his  father  cared  more  for 
this  side  of  his  own  influence,  and  neglected,  as  many 
artists  neglect,  his  own  real  genius.  He  may,  in  fact, 
never  have  influenced  his  son  towards  Realism,  or, 
on  the  other  hand,  his  son  may  not  have  cared  for  it. 
At  any  rate,  as  far  as  we  can  judge,  Holbein  matured 
much  more  slowly  in  the  direction  of  the  gift  for  which 
to-day  we  most  honour  him. 

[It  must  be  remembered  that  biographical  details 
regarding  Holbein  are  largely  conjectural  and  more 
than  largely  controversial.  It  is  perfectly  possible 
that  Holbein  did  not  make,  strictly  speaking,  a  "  wander 
year  "  at  this  time,  for  there  is  very  good  evidence  to 
support  the  idea  that  his  father,  and  indeed  his 
whole  family,  moved  at  about  this  time  from  Augsburg 
to  Lucerne.  Confusion  constantly  arises  at  about 
this  time  between  Holbein  the  younger  and  his  father. 
For  instance,  it  is  difficult  to  be  certain  whether  the 
Hans  Holbein  who  became  a  citizen  of  Lucerne 
and  a  member  of  the  Painters'  Guild  there,  and  the 
Hans  Holbein  who  in  the  same  year  was  fined  for 
brawling  in  Lucerne — ^whether  that  Hans  Holbein 
were  the  elder  or  the  younger.  Some  theorists  hold 
that  the  younger  Hans  aided  his  father  in  the  great 
St.  Sebastian  picture.  But  there  is  little  evidence, 
either  historic  or  plastic,  to  support  this.    I  am, 

19 


HOLBEIN 

however,  scarcely  concerned  with  the  historic  facts 
of  Holbein's  career.  It  may  be  taken  as  fairly  certain 
that  Holbein  the  younger  did  paint  this  Madonna, 
and  probably  at  Constance — for  it  is  unlikely  that  the 
Domherr  Johann  von  Botzenheim  would  have  sent 
to  Lucerne  a  commission  to  a  boy  of  seventeen  or 
eighteen.  At  any  rate  we  may  accept  the  picture  as 
some  sort  of  evidence  of  what  at  that  date  was  Holbein's 
technical  ability.  We  may  infer  that  he  had  then  left 
his  father's  studio,  whether  at  Lucerne  or  Augsburg, 
and  that  very  probably  he  was  on  his  way  to  Basle.] 


20 


Ill 


WE  find  Holbein  next  for  certain  at  Basle, 
where  in  the  year  15 15  Leo  X's  Breve  ad 
Erasmum  "  appeared  in  the  third  edition, 
published  by  Johannes  Frobenius  with  a  title-page 
designed  by  Holbein. 

The  Switzerland  that  Holbein  first  knew  resembled 
the  Japan  of  the  day  before  yesterday.  It  was  just 
receiving  the  new  tide — the  tide  equivalent  to  that  of 
the  Japanese  Western  civilization.  Basle  itself  was 
essentially  a  Germanic  town,  though  by  this  time  only 
officially  a  city  of  the  Empire. 

Its  institutions,  its  faith,  its  art,  and  its  literature 
were  still  generally  Gothic  or  Teutonic.  But  the  other 
tide  which  we  call  the  Renaissance  had  already  begun 
to  reach  Basle,  if  not  to  affect  the  laws,  the  institutions, 
or  the  people  of  the  city. 

The  tide  was,  as  it  were,  definitely  attracted  to  her 
by  the  artists,  and  more  particularly  by  the  great 
printers,  who  were  themselves  assuredly  great  artists. 
Frobenius  and  Amerbach  were  already  what  we  might 
call  the  official  printers  of  the  Humanists.  The 
greatest  of  them  all,  Erasmus,  a  man  of  universal 
fame,  had  at  that  time  just  left  France.  He  had 
appeared  at  the  printing-house  of  Frobenius,  and  in 
15 15  was  already  sharing  with  him  the  house  "  Zum 
Sessel  am  Fischmarkt^^'*  to  which  the  young  Holbeins 
must  have  gone  as  designers  seeking  work. 

But  when  Holbein  first  came  to  Basle,  the  New 

21 


HOLBEIN 

Learning  was  still  a  thing  existing  mostly  for  the  lettered 
classes,  and  the  new  faith,  if  it  had  there  made  progress 
at  all,  manifested  itself  mostly  in  an  uneasy  discontent 
amongst  the  lowest  people. 

Holbein's  first  visit  to  Basle  appears  to  have  been  of 
quite  short  duration  ;  possibly  it  lasted  for  a  year  and 
a  half.  The  most  usual  German  theory  is  that,  with 
the  idea  of  qualifying  himself  for  a  member  of  the 
Basle  Guild  "  Zum  Himmel,^^  he  apprenticed  himself 
to  a  Basle  painter.  He  then,  the  theory  proceeds, 
executed  various  pieces  of  supervised  painting.  Sup- 
posing this  to  have  been  the  case,  he  would  merely  have 
supplied  colour  to  designs  made  or  generally  indicated 
by  his  master.  The  extreme  German  theorists  go 
so  far  as  to  identify  the  master  with  Hans  Herbster, 
the  painter  ;  this  on  the  strength  of  the  fact  that  one 
of  the  Holbeins  painted  a  portrait  of  Herbster  in 
1516. 

We  may  accept  these  theories  or  not,  but  the  point 
is,  to  what  extent,  if  any,  the  teaching  of  this  suppositive 
master  affected  Holbein's  technical  abilities  ?  In  the 
Basle  Museum  there  is  a  series  of  pictures  of  the  Passion 
of  Christ,  which  presents  one  with  serious  problems  of 
thought.  In  the  first  place  there  appears  to  be  com- 
paratively little  doubt  that  the  pictures  are  actually 
by  Holbein.  Holbein's  friend  Bonifacius  Amerbach  in 
after  years  made  a  careful  collection  of  all  the  Holbein 
pictures  and  drawings  that  he  could  lay  his  hands  on. 
This  collection  forms  the  nucleus  of  the  fine  series 
of  Holbeins  now  in  the  possession  of  the  town  of 
Basle. 

In  Amerbach's  own  catalogue  The  Last  Supper  of 
this  series  is  called  :  Hans  Holbeins  erster  Arbeiten  eine, 
meaning  roughly  This  is  one  of  H.  H.'s  first  works." 
A  precisely  similar  note  is  appended  to  the  entry 
regarding  the  picture  of  the  scourging  of  Christ. 
22 


HOLBEIN 

These  two  works  both  belonged  to  Amerbach.  The 
Basle  authorities  have  since  added  to  them  three  other 
works,  obviously  hy  the  same  painter,  and  obviously 
of  the  same  series — Christ  on  the  Mount  of  Olives,  The 
Betrayal  of  Christ,  and  Pilate  Washing  his  Hands, 

These  large,  ugly,  but  very  forcible  and  very 
dramatic  paintings  on  linen  do  not  fit  in  very  easily 
into  the  sequence  of  Holbein's  other  paintings.  I 
mean  that  supposing  we  take  the  first  Virgin  and  Child 
(15 14)  and  the  portrait  of  Amerbach  (15 19)  as  definite 
and  assured  landmarks  in  the  progress  of  Holbein's 
technique,  the  painter  must  have  made  a  very  serious 
deviation  to  arrive  at  the  peculiar  region  of  coarse 
painting,  harsh  colour,  and  abrupt  and  violent  atti- 
tudes in  which  there  could  have  existed  these  concep- 
tions of  a  Passion.  It  is  as  if  he  must  have  been  drawn 
out  of  his  straight  course  by  some  peculiar  attraction. 
Dramatic  as  some  of  his  later  designs  may  have  been, 
not  one  of  them  is  so  violent,  or  so  brutal,  as  the 
Scourging,  not  one  of  them  so  vividly  represents 
arms  in  the  actual  svrfng  of  their  descent.  Thus  both 
in  conception  and  in  execution  Holbein  would  appear 
to  have  been  under  an  influence  that  was  not  his 
father's,  that  was  not  a  product  of  his  own  evolution. 

On  the  strength  of  Amerbach's  notes,  then,  we  may 
accept  the  Passion  series  as  Holbein's  work ;  on  the 
strength  of  the  works  themselves  we  may  well  believe 
that  in  these  years  he  did  actually  work  in  the  studio 
of  some  Basle  artist  of  a  considerable  personality  of 
his  own.  As  far  as  the  paintings  themselves  are 
concerned,  we  may  also  actually  believe  that  Holbein 
merely  completed  the  designs  of  a  master  who  reached 
considerably  further  back  into  the  regions  of  style. 

For  the  Scourging  at  the  Pillar  has  no  exuberant 
Renaissance  decorations  of  any  kind  :  there  are  a  bare 
brick  wall,  a  bare  pillar,  a  bare  tiled  floor,  a  naked 

23 


HOLBEIN 

figure.  The  scourgers  are  dressed  in  contemporary 
costume ;  their  breeches  are  slashed,  their  shoes 
enormous,  their  hair  cut  after  the  fashion  of  Holbein's 
own  time.  There  does  not  in  fact  appear  to  have  been 
any  room  in  this  design  for  the  peculiar  personality 
of  Holbein.  It  is,  as  it  were,  a  rather  barbaric  concep- 
tion that  draws  its  being  from  an  older  generation. 
This  Scourging  is  the  first  of  this  series.  In  the 
subsequent  pictures  Holbein  seems  gradually  to  assert 
himself.  In  the  Last  Suffer  the  figures  of  the  Saviour 
and  the  Apostles  may  well  have  been  indicated  by 
another  master.  But  the  decorations  at  the  back  of 
the  table  are  already  once  more  Renaissance  improvisa- 
tions. There  are  the  bases  of  marble  columns,  and 
an  arched  door  decorated  with  the  inevitable  cherubs. 
It  is  as  if  the  master  had  left  at  the  back  of  his  design 
a  blank  space  which  the  pupil  filled  up  with  fancies 
after  his  own  heart. 

The  fact  that  these  pictures  are  painted  on  linen 
indicates  that  they  were  not  intended  for  permanent 
preservation.  They  were  probably  ordered  for  some 
Church  feast  in  the  neighbourhood,  and  this  may 
account  for  their  slapdash  painting. 

They  were  in  fact  journey-work,  and  it  was  to 
journey-work  that  Holbein  devoted  himself  during 
these  years  of  his  first  stay  in  Basle.  He  designed 
title-pages,  such  as  that  to  the  "  Breve  ad  Erasmum," 
and  that  to  the  Basle  edition  of  Sir  Thomas  More's 

Utopia."  He  painted  the  tops  of  tables  and  the 
small  heads  of  saints  to  fill  in  niches  in  houses.  Two 
of  these  last  are  also  in  the  Amerbach  Collection 
at  Basle.  In  Amerbach's  catalogue  they  are  described 
as  being  next  to  the  Passion  pictures  "  die  frilhesten 
Werke  des  jungern  Holbein,^^  and  these  indeed  would 
seem  to  show  us  the  young  Holbein  getting  back  into 
what  was  later  so  very  much  his  own  country.  The 
24 


OFlhL 
UNIVERSITY  OF  ILUNOIS 


HOLBEIN 


one,  a  Head  of  a  Virgin^  crowned,  naive,  and  not  very 
skilfully  painted  from  some  model,  is  much  more 
actual  in  conception  than  any  of  the  Passion  pictures, 
and  it  is  much  more  v^ithin  the  limits  of  its  painter's 
capacity.  It  is  a  more  personal  v^ork.  And  if  the 
Keai  of  a  Saint  commonly  called  St.  John  the  Evan- 
gelist is  somewhat  sentimentalized,  there  is  no  reason 
why  a  boy,  painting  in  piously  Catholic  times,  should 
not  sentimentalize  the  most  mystical  of  the  evangelists. 

What  one  would  wish  to  emphasize  is  the  fact 
that  there  were  three  or  more  definite  strains  of 
influence  at  work  in  the  pictures  of  this  date.  There 
was  the  extreme  violence  of  The  Scourging,  This 
we  shall  find  later  again  in  the  series  of  designs  for 
stained  glass,  also  a  Passion  series.  This  violence  may 
have  been  part  of  Holbein's  exuberant  youth,  or  it 
may  have  been  part  of  the  inheritance  of  his  age — 
an  age  which  desired  to  see  violent  scenes  rendered 
violently.  We  see  the  same  sort  of  brutality  of  con- 
ception, tempered,  however,  by  a  decorative  quality 
that  Holbein's  early  pictures  had  not,  in  the  works  of 
the  Augsburg  master,  Jorg  Breu  the  elder.  The 
common  people  demanded  violent  renderings  of  sacred 
narratives  :  the  priests  were  ready  to  supply  the 
demand  by  commissioning  such  paintings. 

Holbein  himself,  as  we  shall  see  later,  was  never 
above  doing  his  best  to  supply  a  demand.  He  was 
much  more  a  craftsman  in  our  modern  sense  of  the 
term  than  a  self-denying  "  artist  "  such  as  we  now 
clamour  for.  His  business  was  to  obtain  work  first, 
and  for  this  reason  he  strove  to  please  his  customers. 
That  he  had  any  more  mystical  ideals  of  the  functions 
of  an  artist  we  have  no  means  of  telling. 

We  know,  too,  that  what  delighted  him  was  Renais- 
sance decoration,  and  this  was  a  plastic  delight,  a  per- 
sonal taste,  rather  than  an  influence  from  without. 

25 


HOLBEIN 


And,  deeper  down  in  the  boy,  at  the  very  heart  of 
the  rose  as  it  were,  there  was  slumbering  the  deep, 
human,  untroubled,  and  tranquil  delight  in  the  outward 
aspect  of  humanity,  in  eyes,  in  lips,  in  the  form  of 
hair,  in  the  outlines  of  the  face  from  ear  to  chin. 
This  delight  in  rendering  produced  the  matchless 
series  of  portraits  of  his  later  years  which  for  us  to-day 
are  "  Holbein." 

Personally  I  seem  to  see  these  strains  very  clearly 
in  the  work  of  that  date.  Thus  at  the  one  extreme 
we  may  put  the  Passion  pictures  of  15 15,  and  at  the 
other  the  portraits  of  Jakob  Meier  and  his  bride 
Dorothea  Kannegiesser — and  in  between  them  an 
Adam  and  Eve^  of  15 17.  The  Passion  pictures  are 
violent  ;  the  heads  of  saints  are  timidly  idealized,  but 
painted  direct  from  models.  The  portraits  of  the 
Biirgermeister  and  wife  are  simply  portraits.  But  the 
Adam  and  Eve  is,  as  it  were,  dramatic  portraiture ; 
it  forms  the  stepping-stone  between  the  Passion  series 
and  the  portraits.  The  look  upon  the  face  of  the 
Eve,  as  if,  having  tasted  the  fruit,  she  had  found 
it  very  bitter,  the  contorted  attitude  of  the  Adam,  his 
eyes  gazing  upwards  as  if  cringing  before  omnipotent 
wrath — these  are  at  once  dramatic  in  the  sense  of 
having  been  invented,  and  real  in  the  sense  of 
having  been  observed.  One  cannot  ask  more  of  a 
subject-picture — except  that  it  should  be  well  drawn 
and  painted. 

In  this  sense,  too,  the  Adam  and  Eve  lies  between 
the  Meier  portraits  and  the  Passion  pictures.  It  is 
not  so  coarsely  painted  as  the  big  pictures,  it  is  not  so 
flatly  "  washed  in  "  as  the  portraits,  which  latter  are 
painted  as  if  Holbein  were  trying  to  develop  for 
himself  a  method  of  painting  portraits  in  oil  which 
was  simply  the  same  as  that  of  his  first  sketches  for  the 
portraits  themselves. 
26 


HOLBEIN 


This  method  he  had  certainly  learned  from  his 
father,  and  it  is  as  if  he  had  preserved  his  precious 
secret  beneath  all  the  noise  and  display  of  his  Basle 
master's  teaching,  or  of  the  demands  made  upon  him 
by  the  Basle  crowds. 

In  his  portraits  his  method  was  the  same  throughout 
his  life.  He  made  a  silverpoint  outline  of  his  sitter — 
put  in  light  washes  of  colour  on  the  face  ;  just  indi- 
cated the  nature  of  ornaments  ;  made  pencil  notes 
of  furs,  orders,  or  the  colour  of  eyebrows  ;  and  then 
took  his  delicate  sketch  home  with  him  to  work  out  the 
oil  picture  probably  from  memory. 

The  Meier  portraits  we  may  thus  regard  as  being 
the  first  of  the  great  Holbeins.  The  sketches  and  the 
paintings  themselves  may  both  be  seen  in  the  Basle 
Museum,  and  it  is  interesting  to  see  how  Holbein 
elaborated  the  costume  of  Dorothea,  whilst  he 
simplified  the  painting  of  her  face.  And  in  these 
portraits  once  more  the  Renaissance  decorations  fill  in 
the  picture  and  complete  the  composition. 

In  his  latest  and  greatest  portraits  Holbein  dispensed 
almost  entirely  with  these  decorations.  The  figure 
was  there,  and  nothing  else.  And  it  is  a  matter  for 
speculation  whether  the  young  Holbein  painted 
them  to  satisfy  himself  or  his  customer.  He  had,  as 
I  have  said,  his  customer  always  very  clearly  before 
his  mind's  eye,  and  even  so  late  in  life  as  on  his  second 
visit  to  England  he  painted  the  celebrated  display  " 
portrait  of  George  Gisze  to  show  the  German  mer- 
chant of  the  Steelyard  what  he  could  do.  Thus,  no 
doubt,  we  may  regard  the  elaborated  painting  of  Frau 
Meier's  jewelled  smock  as  being  in  the  nature  of  an 
attempt  to  get  further  orders. 

Outside  the  realm  of  pure  painting,  Holbein 
certainly  did  do  his  best  to  get  further  orders.  Thus 
we  may  account  for  the  celebrated  production  called 

27 


HOLBEIN 

Hans  Bdr^s  Table.  Here  not  only  are  all  manner  of 
painted  quips  and  cranks,  such  as  a  depiction  of  that 
"  nobody  "  who  does  all  the  mischief,  but  various 
objects  are  supposed  to  lie  on  top  of  the  pictures 
themselves,  so  that  the  beholder  may  be  tricked  into 
picking  them  up.  The  v^ork  is  not  of  any  particular 
importance,  but  the  Schoolmaster^ s  Signboards  of  15 15 
are  naive  and  rather  charming  serious  attempts  at 
painting.  If  they  are  not  as  good  in  their  v^ay  as  the 
Meier  portraits,  they  are — these  two  little  designs — 
quaint  and  actual  in  a  high  degree  :  a  proof,  if  any 
were  needed,  that  Holbein  observed  very  closely  the 
life  of  the  people  around  him.  They  are  like  little 
Hogarths  in  their  bareness,  their  selection  of  towels, 
handwashing  fountains,  and — if  one  cares  to  read  in 
these  pictures  a  story — in  their  portrayal  of  the  Indus- 
trious and  the  Idle  Scholar. 

Thus  at  the  end  of  his  first  visit  to  Basle  we  may 
regard  Holbein  as  having  done  a  certain  amount  of 
journey-work  ;  as  having  come  in  the  capacity  of  a 
printer's  workman  into  connexion  with  the  great 
Humanists  ;  and  as  remaining  most  probably  a  follower 
of  the  Old  Faith  along  with  the  greater  portion  of 
the  population  of  this  city  of  Basle.  He  appears  to 
have  returned  to  Lucerne  in  15 16-17,  and  there,  as 
I  have  said,  either  he  or  his  father  entered  the  Guild 
of  Painters,  and  either  he  or  his  father  had  to  pay  a 
fine  for  brawling. 


28 


IV 

HE  reappears  only  intermittently  until  the  year 
15 19,  when  he  is  once  again  to  be  found  at 
Basle,  and  has  by  that  time  become  a  real 
master.  Of  what  happened  in  the  meantime  the  great 
historians  can  do  little  more  than  conjecture.  We 
know  that  in  Lucerne  in  15 17  he  decorated  both  the 
inside  and  outside  of  Jakob  von  Hertenstein's  house. 
It  is  conjectured  that  he  settled  in  Altdorf,  because 
in  the  background  of  one  of  his  designs  there  appear 
buildings  somewhat  resembling  those  of  Altdorf. 
It  is  conjectured  also  that  he  travelled  in  Italy,  because 
the  fagade  of  the  Hertenstein  house  is  copied  direct 
from  Mantegna's  Triumph,  whilst  his  Last  Supper  of 
a  certainly  later  but  uncertain  date  is  copied  almost 
as  directly  from  Leonardo's.  None  of  these  three 
theories  can  be  supported  by  evidence  that  would  be 
in  the  least  good  in  a  court  of  law,  for  Mantegna 
engravings  were  extremely  common  in  Switzerland  at 
that  time  ;  Leonardo's  works  were  frequently  copied, 
and  the  copies  distributed  about  the  world,  whilst 
Altdorf  is  near  enough  to  Lucerne  for  Holbein  to  have 
made  a  sketching  journey  so  far.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  intercourse  between  Switzerland  and  Italy  was 
extremely  close  ;  the  Swiss  poured  down  from  their 
mountains  in  considerable  numbers  and  very  frequently, 
and  Holbein's  own  patron,  Meier,  had  led  Swiss  troops 
down  into  the  Lombard  plain.  Thus  Holbein  may 
without  the  least  stretch  of  probability  have  gone  into 

29 


HOLBEIN 


Italy  either  on  his  own  account  or  at  the  desire  of  some 
patron. 

The  extent  to  which  the  Swiss  preoccupied  the  minds 
of  the  Itahans  is  proved  hy  the  fact  that  MachiavelH, 
in  writing  of  the  ancient  Roman  miHtary  genius, 
modelled  his  accounts  of  their  evolutions  on  the 
exploits  of  the  Swiss  invaders.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  influence  of  the  Italian  painters  on  the  Swiss 
and  German  masters  is  extremely  easy  to  trace  and 
frequent  of  occurrence  at  this  date.  The  earlier 
Basle  masters,  such  as  that  great  man  Conrad  Vitz, 
were  more  directly  under  the  influence  of  the  Van 
Eycks,  of  the  Meister  von  Flemalle,  and  of  the  Flemish 
masters  generally.  But  such  painters  as  Hans  Fries 
and  Jorg  Breu  the  elder  in  the  Samson  series  to  which 
I  have  already  referred  were  very  obviously  inspired 
by  Italians. 

Thus  in  the  Samson  series  whole  motives,  figures, 
and  incidents  are  "  lifted "  directly  from  Italian 
engravings  and  nielli.  In  this  they  followed  the  fashion 
of  their  age,  just  as  our  own  Elizabethan  sonneteers 
translated  directly  from  Petrarch.  And  Holbein,  in 
copying  Mantegna,  was  no  doubt  perfectly  justified  in 
his  own  mind. 

He  was  no  doubt  perfectly  justified  too  by  the  custom 
of  his  age  in  decorating,  as  he  did,  the  houses  of  his 
time.  He  painted  sham  porticoes,  sham  steps,  sham 
garden  walls,  and  an  innumerable  quantity  of  sham 
architectural  devices,  both  internal  and  external, 
filling  up  the  interstices  with  pictures  of  the  Seasons, 
of  the  Greek  divinities,  or  of  dogs  and  peasants.  We 
may  nowadays  accept  Sapor  the  King  of  the  Persians, 
or  Leaia  biting  out  a  tongue :  we  may  accept  in  fact  the 
pictures.  But  the  sham  architecture  we  must  needs 
call  bastard,  holding  that  a  wall  must  look  like  a  wall 
of  honest  brick  if  it  be  made  of  brick  ;  or  stone,  not 

30 


HOLBEIN 

marble,  if  it  be  made  of  stone  ;  or  wood  if  it  be  wood. 
The  artist  in  fact  has  to  respect  his  materials  and  must 
consider  that  a  painted  pillar,  however  much  it  may 
look  like  a  pillar,  is  an  unspeakable  sin. 

Holbein  took  the  world  as  he  found  it,  did  what  he 
was  asked  to  do,  and  did  it  a  great  deal  better  than 
anyone  else,  and  to  condemn  him  would  be  as  unprofit- 
able and  as  unjust  as  to  abuse  Sir  Thomas  More  for 
making  it  his  proudest  boast,  for  having  it  inscribed  on 
his  tomb,  to  flaunt  in  the  face  of  all  posterity,  that  he 
was  hcereticis  molestus. 

Taking  it,  then,  for  granted  that  Holbein,  with  the 
innocence  of  a  child  doing  what  it  sees  others  do,  took 
part  in  a  movement  that  was  to  lead  architecture 
eventually  down  into  the  unsoundable  Avernus  that 
it  has  at  present  reached,  we  may  concede  to  the 
cartoons  for  these  fresco-designs  merits  which  on  the 
strength  of  their  achievements  alone  would  place 
Holbein  among  the  great  masters.  Their  composition 
is  forcible,  the  line  is  flowing,  the  drawing  of  figures 
nearly  always  exactly  observed  and  vigorously  rendered, 
whilst  they  are  still  conventional  enough  to  be  very 
largely  decorative.  It  is  while  he  was  in  the  full  flood 
of  producing  these  and  similar  designs  for  coloured  glass 
that  we  take  him  up  once  more  in  the  city  of  Basle. 

Going  back  there  he  must  have  found  the  state  of 
affairs  in  externals  very  similar  to  that  of  the  Basle 
he  had  left.  Only  the  shadows  of  the  approaching 
changes  were  deepening.  He  found  his  brother 
Ambrosius  still  at  work  designing  initials  and  title- 
pages  for  the  printers,  or  designing  dagger-sheaths 
and  gold  bands  for  goldsmiths.  One  of  these  gold- 
smiths, George  Schweiger,  himself,  like  the  young 
Holbein,  from  Augsburg,  had  been  Ambrosius'  sponsor 
into  the  Guild  which  included  painters,  surgeons,  and 
barbers,  "  Zum  HimmeW 

31 


HOLBEIN 

His  portrait  by  Ambrosius  has  in  its  way  merits 
as  great  as  those  in  any  of  the  earlier  portraits  of 
Holbein  himself  ;  that  is  to  say,  that  what  it  lacks 
in  depth  of  painting  it  makes  up  in  a  sort  of  flat 
decorative  look  and  in  a  poetic  rendering  that  suggests 
the  influence  of  Diirer.  But  on  the  whole  we  know 
very  little  of  either  the  career  or  the  talents  of  Holbein's 
elder  brother.  There  is  another  small  painting  in 
the  Basle  Museum  which  suggests  the  influence  of 
Diirer.  This  is  called  Christus  als  Furbitter — Christ 
interceding  before  God  the  Father.  In  this  not  very 
well  composed  design  the  figure  of  the  Saviour  is 
copied  directly  from  the  title-page  of  Diirer's  Greater 
Passion^  whilst  the  ring  of  angels  above  the  head  of 
the  Christ  appears  to  have  been  suggested  by  the  little 
Diirer  drawing  called  A  Dance  of  Monkeys  which 
formed  part  of  the  Amerbach  Collection,  and  is  now 
in  the  Basle  Museum.  If  this  be  the  case  Ambrosius 
must  have  lived  till  1523. 

Ambrosius,  and  no  doubt  Holbein  himself,  belonged 
to  a  little  group  of  Suabians  of  whom  there  were  then 
a  considerable  number  in  Basle  itself.  They  were 
mostly  artists  who  were  attracted  thither  by  the  work 
offered.  The  books  decorated  with  woodcuts  and 
initials,  for  which  Basle  was  so  celebrated,  were 
exposed  for  sale  in  great  quantities  in  the  yearly  markets. 
And  it  should  be  remembered  that  Amerbach  the 
printer  was  himself  a  Suabian.  If  we  take  into  account 
the  fact  that  the  most  intimate  Basle  friend  of  Holbein 
was  Bonifacius  Amerbach,  the  son  of  the  printer,  we 
may  conjecture  that  it  was  to  Amerbach  the  Suabian, 
rather  than  to  Frobenius,  that  the  two  Holbeins  first 
applied  in  coming  to  Basle.  At  any  rate,  through  one 
or  the  other  printer,  Holbein  came  under  the  notice 
of  the  great  Erasmus  and  under  the  influence  of  the 
Humanists.  He  was  admitted  to  the  "  Zunft  zum 
32 


By  permission  of  Messrs.  Braun, 


HOLBEIN 


HimmeV  in  September  1519,  and  in  July  1520  he 
became  a  citizen  of  Basle  in  order  to  qualify  himself 
for  practising  there  as  a  master.  And  probably  at 
about  the  same  date  and  for  the  same  reasons  he 
married  a  widow  with  two  children. 

He  was  then  aged  twenty-three.  Some  doubts 
have  been  thrown  upon  the  portrait  of  himself,  a 
chalk  drawing  of  about  this  date,  which  is  at  present 
No.  66  in  the  catalogue  of  the  Basle  Museum.  It 
descends  from  the  Amerbach  Collection.  The  inscrip- 
tion at  present  underneath  it  runs  :  "  Imago  Pict. 
celeberr.  Johann  Holbein,  ejusdemque  opus.^^  But  this 
inscription  is  of  later  date.  The  objection  taken  to 
the  picture  is  that  the  note  in  Amerbach's  catalogue 
may  be  taken  to  mean  "  a  likeness  "  either  "  of  "  or 
"  by  "  Holbein,  the  German  word  von  having  both 
meanings.  Tradition,  however,  translates  the  von  "  of," 
and  tradition  is  frequently  of  enough  weight  to  send 
down  an  equal  balance. 

The  likeness,  which  is  a  masterly  piece  of  pastel 
work,  is  so  like  the  mental  image  of  the  man  that  one 
forms  from  his  works,  that  one  may  accept  it  as  a 
portrait  and  retain  it  privately  in  one's  mind  as  an 
image.  It  is  the  head  of  a  reliable  and  good-humoured 
youth,  heavy-shouldered,  with  a  massive  neck  and  an 
erected  round  head — the  head  of  a  man  ready  to  do 
any  work  that  might  come  in  his  way  with  a  calm  self- 
reliance.  The  expression  is  entirely  different  from 
that  in,  say,  Durer's  portrait  of  himself  ;  from  the 
nervous,  intent  glare  and  the  somewhat  self-conscious 
strained  gaze.  Holbein  neither  wrote  about  his  art 
nor  about  his  religion — nor,  alas !  did  he  sign  and  date 
every  piece  of  paper  that  left  his  hand.  He  was  not 
a  man  with  a  mission,  but  a  man  ready  to  do  a  day's 
work.  And  the  intent  expression  of  his  eyes,  which 
calmly  survey  the  world,  suggests  nothing  so  much  as 

c  33 


HOLBEIN 


that  of  a  thoroughly  efficient  fieldsman  in  a  game  of 
cricket  who  misses  no  motion  of  the  game  that  passes 
beneath  his  eyes,  because  at  any  moment  the  ball  may 
come  in  his  direction. 

Diirer  signed  each  of  his  works,  because  a  friend  in 
early  life  suggested  that  in  that  way  he  should  follow 
the  example  of  Apelles.  He  added  to  his  drawings 
inscriptions  such  as  :  "  This  is  the  way  knights  were 
armed  at  this  time,"  or  "  This  is  the  dress  ladies  wore 
in  Nuremberg  in  going  to  a  ball  in  15  lo,"  as  if  he  were 
anxious  to  add  another  personal  note  to  that  which 
the  drawings  themselves  should  carry  down  to  posterity : 
as  if  he  were  anxious  to  make  his  voice  heard  as  well  as 
the  work  of  his  hands  seen.  Holbein  once  in  painting 
a  portrait  of  one  of  his  supposed  mistresses  implies 
that  he  himself  was  Apelles.  He  calls  her  Lais 
Corinthiaca,  and  Lais  of  Corinth  was  the  mistress  of 
the  great  Greek  painter.  But  he  scarcely  ever  added 
notes  to  his  designs,  and  he  never  seems  to  have  troubled 
about  his  personality  at  all. 

The  eyes  of  his  own  portrait  are  those  of  a  good- 
humoured  sceptic,  the  eyes  of  Diirer  those  of  a  fanatic. 
Diirer  attempted  to  amend  by  his  drawings  the  life 
of  his  day  ;  Holbein  was  contented  with  rendering 
life  as  he  saw  it.  Diirer,  after  having  plunged  into 
the  waters  of  the  Renaissance,  abandoned  them  self- 
consciously— because  it  was  not  right  for  a  Christian 
man  to  portray  heathen  gods  and  goddesses.  Holbein, 
if  he  gradually  dropped  Renaissance  decorations  out 
of  his  portraits,  did  it  on  purely  aesthetic  grounds. 
He  continued  to  the  end  of  his  life  to  make  Renaissance 
designs  for  goldsmiths,  for  printers,  for  architects,  or 
for  furniture  makers.  Diirer  identified  himself  pas- 
sionately with  Luther,  in  whom  he  found  an  emotional 
teacher  after  his  own  heart.  Holbein,  in  one  and  the 
same  year,  painted  the  Meier  Madonna  and  designed 

34 


HOLBEIN 


headpieces  for  Lutheran  pamphlets  so  violent  and 
scurrilous  that  the  Basle  Town  Council,  itself  more 
than  half-Lutheran,  forbade  their  sale. 

Holbein  probably  was  endowed  with  the  saving 
grace  of  humour.  It  is  suggestive  to  find  these  two 
great  artists  as  it  were  entangling  their  arts,  meeting 
for  a  moment,  and  parting.  Holbein,  to  while  away 
some  winter  evenings  in  15 15,  made  a  number  of 
rough  pen-drawings  commenting  upon  rather  than 
illustrating  Erasmus'  "  Praise  of  Folly."  These 
drawings  were  made  in  the  margin  of  the  book  itself. 
Diirer  had  made  a  number  of  similar  drawings  in  the 
margin  of  a  copy  of  the  New  Testament.  These 
drawings  of  Diirer's  present  striking  resemblances  to 
the  others  of  Holbein's.  Thus  Diirer's  Folly  in  cap 
and  bells  might  well  have  formed  the  model  for 
Holbein's  Folly  leaves  her  pulpit.  And  one  of  Holbein's 
sketches  of  a  stag  bounding  through  a  wood  appears 
to  have  been  actually  copied  from  Diirer's  New 
Testament.  Now  Diirer  was  in  Basle  in  15 15.  Thus 
these  two  great  men  appear  to  touch  hands  for  a  second 
and,  significantly  enough,  the  one  under  the  banner 
of  the  Lutherans,  the  other  of  the  Humanists.  These 
little  drawings  make  Holbein,  in  15 15,  touch  hands 
too  with  the  third  very  great  man  of  his  time. 

The  figure  of  Erasmus  dominates  of  course  those 
of  all  other  associates  of  Holbein  in  the  Swiss  city  of 
early  days.  His  doctrine  of  gentleness  and  his  humour, 
that  extremists  reasonably  enough  found  trying,  ulti- 
mately caused  him  to  leave  Basle.  That  city  indeed 
resembled  a  hornet's  nest  by  the  year  1529,  and  his 
sharp  and  sardonic  tongue  had  rendered  him  unpopular, 
as  all  observers  must  be  unpopular  amongst  men  of 
action.  He  hit  off  salient  points  too  sharply ;  a 
quiet  man,  he  resented  the  violent  outcries  of  the 
Lutherans  who  ultimately  became  dominant  in  Basle. 

35 


HOLBEIN 


He  called,  indeed,  these  outcries  "  tragedies,"  using 
the  word  in  no  complimentary  sense,  and,  upon  the 
occasion  of  the  marriage  of  CEcolampadius  the 
Reformer,  he  let  fall  the  remark  that  "  Lutheran 
tragedy  always  ends  happily  in  weddings."  Neverthe- 
less it  must  have  been  an  age  that  we  may  well  envy — 
an  age  in  which  gentle  irony,  or  irony  of  any  kind, 
could  make  a  man  world-famous.  For  that  was  the 
fate  of  Erasmus.  And,  if  Basle  ultimately  became  too 
hot  to  hold  him,  it  speaks  nevertheless  for  the  tolera- 
tion of  the  Reformers  that  he  should  have  been  able 
to  remain  for  so  long  amongst  them,  just  as  it  speaks 
for  the  toleration  of  the  upholders  of  the  old  faith 
that  he  should  have  been  able  with  impunity  to  refuse 
at  the  end  of  his  life  a  cardinal's  hat. 

His  tongue  appears  to  have  spared  no  man — and, 
indeed,  the  earliest  trace  that  we  find  of  his  association 
with  Holbein  is  his  little  note  against  the  drawing  of  a 
gross  and  fleshly  character  portrayed  in  the  margin 
of  the  "  Praise  of  Folly."  Holbein  had  "  labelled  " 
another  character  "  Erasmus "  :  Erasmus  set  against 
the  figure  of  a  drunken  boon  companion  the  name 
of  Holbein.  I  do  not  know  that  we  need  accept  the 
fact  as  registering  authentically  the  painter's  drunken 
habits.  In  those  days,  when  sages  assailed  each  other 
with  epithets  of  the  most  vile  during  learned  quarrels 
of  the  most  trivial  dimensions,  the  mere  hinting  that 
a  man  was  not  extravagantly  ascetic  was  little  more 
than  a  friendly  pat  on  the  shoulder.  We  may  indeed 
regard  it  as  gratifying  to  those  of  us  who  are  interested 
for  Holbein  that  so  immeasurably  great  a  man  as  was 
the  Erasmus  of  those  days  should,  in  that  familiar 
vein  of  tu  quoque^  have  acknowledged  companionably 
the  existence  of  a  boy  of  eighteen  who  had  made  rough 
scrawls  of  genius  in  the  margin  of  a  book. 

I  have  hardly  room  for  a  minute  discussion  upon 

36 


HOLBEIN 

such  subjects  as  to  what  degree  did  Holbein  owe  his 
classical  education  to  his  friendship  with  the  author 
of  the  "  Encomium  Morise."  Indeed  we  have  no 
very  valid  evidence  that  any  close  friendship  existed 
between  the  two  men  at  this  early  date,  and  one's  a 
priori  ideas  would  seem  to  deny  the  probability. 
Later,  of  course,  Holbein  made  several  portraits  of 
Erasmus — portraits  of  which  that  great  man  approved 
to  the  extent  of  sending  them  to  friends  by  whom  he 
wished  to  be  remembered.  But,  for  the  rest,  we  must 
imagine  that,  in  early  days  at  all  events,  Holbein  picked 
up  merely  such  rule-of-thumb  acquaintance  with 
classical  legends  as  must  have  been  easily  attainable  in 
every  alehouse  and  painters'  guild  of  the  Basle  of  that 
day.  And,  as  far  as  his  personal  character  is  concerned, 
we  may  regard  it  as  being  satisfactory  testimony  that 
his  friends,  whatever  the  degree  of  their  intimacy, 
remained  friendly  enough  to  patronize  him — since  the 
Humanist  Erasmus  who  gibed  at  him  in  15 15  suffered 
himself  to  be  painted  until  1529,  and  the  earnest  and 
Catholic  Burgomaster  Jakob  Meier  who  went  to  the 
boy  for  a  portrait,  commissioned,  a  decade  or  so  later, 
the  great  Meier  Madonna  from  a  master  whose  ortho- 
doxy must,  by  that  time,  have  been  rather  less  than 
suspect. 


37 


V 


^ir^HE  years  from  15 19,  when  Holbein  returned 
I  to  Basle,  until  1526,  when  he  first  came  to 
JL  this  country,  must  have  formed  a  period  of 
fairly  steady  and  uninterrupted  work.  During  that 
time  he  produced  the  following  works  which,  for  the 
sake  of  clearness  of  reference,  I  tabulate  : 


Paintings 

Portrait  of  Bonifacius  Amerhach,  1519- 
The  Last  Suffer, 

The  Freiburg  Altarpiece  (only  wings  remain). 
The  Basle  Museum  Altar fiece  (Passion  series). 
Designs  for  organ- case. 

Diptych  :    Mater  Dolorosa  and  Christ   the  Man 

of  Sorrows, 
The  Dead  Man,  1521. 
Two  Saints  (SS.  George  and  Ursula),  1522. 
The  Zetter  Madonna  of  Solothurn,  1522. 
Portrait  of  Erasmus,  1523. 
Fenus 

Lais  Corinthiaca 

#  #  #  #  # 

The  [putative]  Portrait  of  himself.  Coloured  chalks. 
{Circa  1520-21.) 

Various  studies  and  drawings  in  the  Basle  Museum, 
many  designs  for  stained  glass,  and  the  designs  for 
wood-engravings,  like  the  Table  of  Cebes  (1522),  the 

38 


HOLBEIN 

Dance  of  Death  series,  an  enormous  number  of  initial 
letters,  and  the  Dance  of  Death  alphabet.  And,  among 
works  of  his  which  we  know  to  have  disappeared,  there 
was,  to  mention  one  alone,  the  decoration  of  the  Basle 
Rath-haus  which  occupied  him  for  a  considerable 
portion  of  the  year  1521. 

***** 

If  Holbein  had  deliberately  set  himself  to  prove, 
in  some  one  piece  of  painting,  that  he  returned  to 
Basle  a  master  of  portraiture,  he  could  have  offered  to 
the  citizens  no  better  a  proof  than  the  portrait  of 
BonifaQus  Amerbach :  and  for  its  sweetness  and 
charm  the  little  picture  might  say  to  Holbein  himself, 
Ne  excedas  I  It  may  well  have  been  his  first  painting 
on  his  return,  for  it  is  dated  a.m.d.xix.  prid.  eid.  oct. 
— 14th  October.  His  reception  into  the  "  Zunft  zum 
Himmel  "  had  taken  place  on  the  25th  September. 
It  offers,  in  its  painting,  more  than  any  other  fact  of 
which  we  can  get  hold  nowadays,  an  inducement  to 
believe  that  Holbein  had  travelled,  during  the  interval 
of  his  absence,  in  Italy,  the  land  of  friendly  and  brilliant 
colour. 

I  know  of  no  more  just  epithets  to  apply  to  the  blues, 
the  reds,  the  whites,  and  the  chestnuts  of  what  is  a 
small  gem.  If  it  have  not  the  cherry  red  and  the  green 
of  Botticelli,  it  has  a  gaiety  in  its  scheme  of  contrasts, 
an,  as  it  were,  diaphanous  effect  of  atmosphere,  that 
neither  Mantegna  nor  Da  Vinci  could  much  have 
bettered  in  the  direction  of  light-heartedness.  Such  a 
sentence  is  perhaps  gratuitous,  but  one  is  tempted 
to  the  utterance.  For,  when  you  compare  the  Meier 
portraits  and  this  one,  you  are  at  once  sensible  that  the 
Holbein  who  painted  Amerbach  has  taken  an  immense 
stride  in  the  direction  of  confidence.  The  Meier 
heads  are  still  flattish  in  effect  :  indeed  the  oil  paintings 

39 


HOLBEIN 

are,  as  I  have  said,  flatter  even  than  the  tinted  sketches, 
as  if  the  painter  v^ere  a  Httle  afraid  of  his  medium  and 
were  w^orking  v^ithin  a  convention,  or  a  Hmit  of 
his  powers  that  he  had  perhaps  learned  from  his 
father.  But  there  is  an  end  of  that  in  the  portrait  of 
Amerbach. 

I  must  leave  it  to  the  reader's  preference  to  decide 
what  exactly  was  the  "  eye-opener  " — to  use  a  vulgar 
word  that  is  precisely  just — Holbein  had  received 
in  the  interval.  I  do  not  myself  see  any  particular 
evidence  of  the  influences  of  Mantegna  and  Da  Vinci  : 
but,  all  the  same,  the  sight,  say,  of  the  Last  Suffer  may 
have  "  given  him  furiously  to  think."  It  may,  I  mean, 
have  given  him  a  shock  that  would  prove  a  very  definite 
impulse  towards  working  out  his  own  salvation,  if 
not  necessarily  in  terms  of  imitation  of  its  painter. 

Hard  work,  the  sight  of  new  skies,  and  a  new 
atmosphere,  the  influence  of  foreign  masters,  or  the 
mere  desire  to  do  his  very  best  in  a  kind  of  "  diploma  " 
work — whatever  it  was  that  made  this  little  work  so 
luminous,  made  it  also  a  touching  record  of  a  friendship 
with  a  very  charming  man.  Perhaps,  indeed,  it  was 
simply  the  glow  of  the  friendship  that  communicated 
itself  to  the  painting.  This  is  not  mere  rhapsody  : 
for  the  picture,  if  we  did  not  know  it  to  be  the  portrait 
of  an  intimate  friend,  would  self-reveal  itself  as  such. 
As  a  rule,  Holbein  cannot  be  called  one  of  those  painters 
who  can  claim  to  have  painted  the  "  soul  "  of  his 
sitters.  For  there  are  some  painters  who  make  that 
claim  :  there  are  many  who  have  it  made  for  them. 
The  claim  is,  on  the  face  of  it,  rendered  absurd  by  the 
use  of  the  word  "  soul."  One  may  replace  it  by  the 
phrase  "  dramatic  generalization,"  when  it  becomes 
more  comprehensible.  What  it  means — to  use  a 
literary  generalization  of  some  looseness — is  that 
the  painter  is  one  accustomed  to  live  with  his  subject 
40 


HOLBEIN 


for  a  time  long  enough  to  let  him  select  a  characteristic 
expression  ;  one  which,  as  far  as  his  selection  can  be 
justified,  shall  be  the  characteristic,  the  dominant 
note,  the  "  moral  "  of  his  sitter.  The  portrait  thus 
becomes,  in  terms  of  the  painter's  abilities,  an  emblem 
of  sweetness,  of  regret,  of  ambition,  of  what  you  will. 
The  sitter  is  caught,  as  it  were,  in  a  moment  of 
action. 

Holbein  hardly  seems  to  have  belonged  to  this  class. 
He  appears  to  have  said  to  his  sitter  as  a  rule  :  "  Sit 
still  for  a  moment  :  think  of  something  that  interests 
you."  He  marked  the  lines  of  the  face,  the  colour  of 
the  hair,  a  detail  of  the  ornament — and  the  thing  was 
done.  It  was  done,  that  is  to  say,  as  far  as  the  observa- 
tion went. 

If  he  wished  to  "  generalize  "  about  his  subject,  he 
did  it  with  some  material  attribute,  giving  to  La'is 
Corinthiaca  coins  and  an  open  palm,  to  George  Gisze 
the  attributes  of  a  merchant  of  the  Steelyard.  I  am 
not  prepared  to  say  whether  the  method  of  Holbein 
or  that  of  the  painters  of  souls  is  the  more  to  be  com- 
mended, but  I  am  ready  to  lay  it  down  that,  in  the 
great  range  of  his  portraits,  Holbein,  as  a  painter  of 
what  he  could  see  with  the  eye  of  the  flesh,  was 
without  any  superior.  Occasionally,  as  in  the  por- 
traits of  Erasmus  in  the  Louvre,  he  passed  over  into 
the  other  camp  and,  without  sacrificing  any  of  his 
marvellous  power  of  rendering  what  he  saw,  added  a 
touch  of  dramatic  generalization,  or  of  action.  This  was 
generally  a  product  of  some  intimacy  with  the  sitter. 

And  it  is  perhaps  this  that  makes  the  portrait  of 
Amerbach  so  charming.  It  is  as  if  Holbein  had  had, 
not  the  one  sitting  that  was  all  so  many  of  his  later 
subjects  afforded  him,  but  many  days  of  observation 
when  his  friend  was  unaware  that  he  was  under  the 
professional  eye. 


HOLBEIN 

In  the  course  of  a  summer  walk  along  the  flowery- 
meadows  of  the  Rhine  near  Klein  Basel — as  the  German 
hypothetic  biographers  are  so  fond  of  writing — perhaps 
Holbein  glanced  aside  at  his  companion.  Amerbach's 
eye  had,  maybe,  caught  the  up-springing  of  some  lark, 
and  the  sight  suspended  for  a  moment  some  wise, 
witty,  slightly  sardonic,  and  pleasantly  erudite  remark. 
Between  the  pause  and  the  speech  Holbein  looked — 
and  the  thing  was  done. 

Hypothesis  or  not,  that  is  the  general  suggestion 
that  the  portrait  makes,  and  its  actuality,  its  accidental 
dramatic  effect,  lifts  it  up,  just  a  little,  above  much 
work  that  he  did  after.  That  and  the  magnificent 
power  of  rendering  that  he  had,  lifted  him  above  any 
level  that  he  would  have  attained  as  a  painter  of 
"  subject  "  pictures.  For  in  the  best  of  his  subject 
pictures  he  showed  a  magnificent  invention  such  as 
is  characteristic  enough  of  his  race  :  in  his  finest 
portraits  he  showed  an  artistic  insight — an  imagination 
such  as  I  am  tempted  to  say  has  been  given  to  no 
German  before  or  since. 

It  shows  itself  next,  most  strongly,  in  the  Dead  Man 
of  two  years  later  (1521).  As  painting  and  drawing, 
this  must  remain  one  of  Holbein's  most  masterly 
works.  It  is  practically  his  sole  important  rendering 
of  the  nude,  which  otherwise  seems  little  to  have 
attracted  him.  But,  carefully  drawn  and  observed, 
dramatically  lighted  and  rendered,  it  remains  a  per- 
manent testimony  to  the  fact  that  Holbein  could 
observe  and  render  anything.  If  he  only  very  occa- 
sionally rendered  the  nude  figure,  it  was  because  only 
very  occasionally  he  had  the  opportunity — just  as, 
though  he  seldom  rendered  animals,  his  little  drawings 
of  bats  and  lambs  in  the  Basle  Museum  prove  what 
masterly  renderings  of  animals  he  was  capable  of ; 
and  just  as  the  drawing  of  Lanzknechts  fighting — 
42 


HOLBEIN 

which  assuredly  is  one  of  Holbein's  most  wonderful 
conceptions — or  the  design  for  the  decoration  in  the 
Basle  Town  Hall,  Samuel  declaring  the  anger  of  the  Lord 
to  Saul,  proves  that  he  could  observe  what  to-day  we 
call  "  men  of  action  "  and  render  them  realistically  or 
decoratively. 

The  Dead  Man  is  a  frank  piece  of  realism.  The 
agonized,  open  mouth  and  the  opened  eyes  add  some- 
thing to  the  horror  of  the  visual  conception,  but  they 
are  all  that  Holbein  added  for  the  purpose  of  drama- 
tization, and  one  may  doubt  to  what  extent  they  serve 
that  purpose.  Otherwise  it  is  just  a  dead  man.  Its 
"  literary  "  genesis  and  what  it  "  means  "  remain 
mysteries.  No  doubt  Holbein  meant  that  each 
beholder  should  interpret  it  for  himself  ;  each  beholder 
must,  at  least,  so  interpret  it.  The  inscription  on  the 
rock  and  the  pierced  side  rudimentarily  convert  this 
dead  man  into  a  counterfeit  presentment  of  the  Man 
who  died  that  death  might  cease.  Nevertheless  it 
remains  open  to  us  to  doubt  whether  these  attribu- 
tions were  more  than  an  afterthought. 

The  subject  of  Death  was  one  that  very  much  pre- 
occupied Holbein  and  his  world.  There  were  then, 
as  it  were,  so  many  fewer  half-way  houses  to  the  grave  : 
prolonged  illnesses,  states  of  suspended  animation, 
precarious  existences  in  draught-proof  environment 
or  what  one  will,  were  then  unknown.  You  were  alive  : 
or  you  were  dead  ;  you  were  very  instinct  with  life  : 
the  arrow  struck  you,  the  scythe  mowed  you  down. 
Thus  Death  and  Life  became  abstractions  that  were 
omnipresent,  and,  the  attributes  of  Death  being  the 
more  palpable.  Death  rather  than  Life  was  the 
preoccupation  of  the  living. 

In  his  most  widely  known  designs  Holbein,  choosing 
the  line  of  least  resistance,  shows  us  this  abstraction 
with  its  attributes.    Employing  little  imagination  of 

43 


HOLBEIN 

his  own,  he  has  lavished  a  feHcitous  and  facile  invention 
along  with,  a  splendid  pov^er  of  draughtsmanship 
upon  an  idea  that  could  be  picked  up  from  the  v^alls 
of  almost  every  ale-house  of  his  time.  In  the  Dead 
Man,  however,  he  takes  a  higher  flight,  showing  us, 
not  a  comparatively  commonplace  abstraction,  but 
nothing  less  than  man,  dead.  It  is  the  picture  of  the 
human  entity  at  its  last  stage  as  an  individual  :  the 
next  step  must  inevitably  be  its  resolution  into 
those  elements  which  can  only  again  be  brought 
together  at  the  beginning  of  the  next  stage.  It  is 
the  one  step  further — the  painting  of  the  inscription 
upon  the  rock  and  of  the  wound  in  the  side — that 
identifies  this  man,  dead,  and  trembling  on  the  verge 
of  dissolution,  with  that  Man,  dead,  who  died  that 
mankind  might  go  its  one  stage  further  towards  an 
eternity  of  joy  and  praise.  And,  by  thus  turning 
a  dead  man  into  the  Dead  Man,  Holbein  performs,  in 
the  realm  of  literary  ideas,  a  very  tremendous  fact 
with  a  very  small  exertion — for  it  is  impossible  to 
imagine  a  human  being  who  will  not  be  brought  to 
a  standstill  and  made  to  think  some  sort  of  thoughts 
before  what  is,  after  all,  a  masterpiece  of  pure  art.  It 
was  that,  perhaps,  that  Holbein  had  in  his  mind. 

It  may  well  be  that  he  had  nothing  of  the  sort,  and 
that  having,  as  it  were,  exhausted,  in  the  search  for 
dramatic  and  melodramatic  renderings  of  episodes 
in  the  life  of  Christ,  every  kind  of  violence  that  he 
could  conceive  of,  he  here  comes  out  at  the  other  end 
of  the  wood  and — just  as  the  Greeks  ended  their 
tragedies,  not  in  a  catastrophe,  but  upon  a  calm  tone 
of  one  kind  or  another — so  Holbein  crowns  his  version 
of  the  earthly  career  of  the  Saviour  with  an  unelaborated 
keystone.  Or  it  may  have  been  merely  a  product  of 
his  spirit  of  revolt.  He  may  have  been  tired  of  sup- 
plying series  after  series  of  Passion  pictures  meant 

44 


3y  permission  of  Messrs    Braun.  Clemem 


HOLBEIN 


to  satisfy  the  hunger  of  his  time  for  strong  meat  in 
religious  portrayals. 

It  was  this  appetite  that  caused  the  existence  of  the 
number  of  works  in  the  Basle  Museum — works  which 
must  make  one  a  little  regret  that  the  Holbein  who 
painted  the  portrait  of  Amerbach  and  the  Dead  Man 
had  not  a  greater  leisure,  since,  vigorous  and  splendid 
as  so  many  of  these  conceptions  are,  they  are  yet 
upon  a  plane  appreciably  lower,  whether  we  regard 
them  as  products  of  art  or  as  "  readings  of  Life,"  to 
use  a  cant  phrase.  In  its  present  disastrously  restored 
state  it  is  difficult  to  regard,  say,  the  early  Last  Supper 
as  other  than  a  rather  uninspired  piece  of  journey- 
work.  Without  the  early  Passion  series  on  linen  one 
would  feel  inclined  to  say  that  it  was  of  doubtful 
ascription.  It  is  interesting  because  it  is  one  more  of 
Holbein's  designs  that  has  been  "  lifted  "  from  an 
Italian  master,  and  because  it  shows  Holbein  pursuing 
a  sort  of  pictorial  realism  to  supply  the  craving  for 
strong  meat  that  I  have  mentioned.  But  in  the 
demand  for  designs  for  coloured  glass  he  found  a 
refuge  which  tided  him  over  dangerous  years.  It 
called  forth,  too,  qualities  which,  if  they  were  not 
amongst  his  very  greatest,  were  yet  sufficient  to  place 
him  among  the  rare  band  of  very  great  decorative 
artists.  It  is  impossible  to  stand,  in  Basle  Museum, 
before  the  series  of  designs — of  Madonnas ;  of  St. 
Anne  with  the  Virgin  and  the  infant  Jesus;  of  the 
charming  little,  short-legged  St.  Katharine  with  the 
immense  sword  ;  of  scenes  from  the  life  of  Christ  ; 
of  armorial  bearings  for  a  family  or  for  a  city  ;  or  of 
drawings  that,  apparently,  were  made  in  speculation 
to  form  part  of  the  glass-worker's  "  stock  "  designs — • 
it  is  impossible  to  consider  this  immense  outpouring 
of  facile  and  wonderful  work  without  saying  that  here 
was  a  great  and  vivid  personality,  carrying  on,  side  by 

45 


HOLBEIN 


side,  within  himself  two  opposed  but  overpowering 
strains  of  artistic  tendency — and  carrying  them  to- 
gether to  ends  so  high  that  at  the  last  they  seem  hardly 
to  conflict. 

In  his  later  portrait  work  he  attained  to  a  region 
more  serene  and  more  valuable  :  but  then  he  trod 
upon  ground  less  dangerous.  Speaking  from  the 
outside  and  in  the  language  of  such  abstract  principles 
as  we  have,  we  might  say  that  to  introduce  realistic 
parts  into  decorative  designs  was  to  commit  the 
unspeakable  sin  against  first  principles.  Yet  almost 
every  drawing  of  the  Passion  Series  has  a  decorative 

look  "  of  its  own.  It  is,  firstly,  a  thing  pleasant  for 
the  eye  to  rest  on — which  is  the  final  end  of  decoration, 
however  attained.  It  is  only  secondarily  that  one 
becomes  aware  that  each  drawing  is  an  even  violent 
portrayal  of  scenes  in  the  life  of  a  man,  despised, 
rejected,  and  given  up  to  the  brutalities  of  a  mob 
whose  vilenesses  Holbein  no  doubt  had  ample  means 
of  observing  in  the  streets  around.  But,  as  I  have 
said,  the  men  brandishing  whips,  the  men  shaking 
fists,  shouting,  and  pulling  their  faces  into  grimaces 
of  vomiting  disgust — even  the  naked  figure  at  the  pillar, 
the  blindfold  figure  with  its  bound  hands,  and  the 
thorn-crowned  man  staggering  beneath  the  heavy 
cross — all  these  observed  and  rendered  actualities  are 
the  secondary  matter  :  the  design  in  its  entirety  is 
the  thing. 

How,  exactly,  it  is  done  is  easy  enough  to  say  ;  the 
Renaissance  architecture  dwarfs  the  figures,  sub- 
ordinates them,  brings  them  into  place  and  gives  "  the 
look  "  to  the  design.  But  how  the  conception  could 
have  come  into  the  master's  head  is  not  so  easy  to 
discover — nor  yet  to  say  how  great  a  master  it  was  that 
could  subordinate  so  magnificent  a  power  of  actual 
observation  and  realistic  rendering — a  thing  that 

46 


By  pemdssioH  of  Afessrs.  Braun,  CUmcni 


UNI  |,><0IS 


HOLBEIN 


weaker  men  of  the  one  sort  would  have  ridden  to  death 
— to  a  power  so  great  of  conceiving  decorative  sur- 
roundings, a  power  that  weaker  men  of  the  other  sort 
would  have  ridden  to  a  death  even  worse.  Ye^t  Holbein 
kept  his  teams  wonderfully  in  hand,  and  the  grotesque 
peasants  of  the  Holdermeier  Arms  or  the  men  in  the 
boat  of  the  Arms  of  the  City  of  Basle  are  no  less  parts 
of  an  harmonious  and  beautiful  design  than  are,  say, 
the  intrinsically  "  pretty  "  Virgin  and  child  of  the 
woodcut  Patron  Saints  of  the  City  of  Freiburg,  It  is 
only  very  occasionally,  as  in  the  Nailing  on  the  Cross, 
that  a  figure — in  this  case  that  of  the  Christ — ever 
seems  to  "  stick  out  "  of  the  design.  It  does  this 
probably  because  of  a  certain  crudeness  of  realization, 
just  as,  in  the  direction  of  prettiness,  the  charming 
little  figure  of  St.  Katharine  or  the  charming  little 
group  of  St.  Anne  and  the  Virgin  stick  out  "  of 
their  respective  designs.  Nevertheless,  none  of  these 
drawings  are  "  realistic  "  in  the  sense  that  the  drawings 
of  the  bat,  or  the  Lanzknechts,  are  actual.  They  have, 
very  admirably,  an  effect  of  being  drawn,  as  it  were, 
from  highly  "  realistic  "  bas-reliefs  ;  the  wash-drawings 
giving  robes  and  even  faces  a  sort  of  general  look  of 
being  carved  in  marble.  And  this,  also,  gives  them  a 
touch  of  aloofness  ;  it  renders  them  convincingly 
decorative. 

How  admirably  these  designs  were  suited  to  their 
purpose  anyone  may  see  who  will  take  the  trouble 
to  visit  the  church  of  St.  Theodore  in  Klein  Basel, 
where  the  Kniender  Ritter  design — oddly  enough 
without  the  Ritter — is  carried  out  in  coloured  glass. 
This  absence  of  the  design's  particular  Hamlet,  the 
dedicator,  gives  one  a  certain  amount  of  matter  for 
thought.  For,  admirable  as  the  designs  are,  they  show 
how  once  more,  in  the  realm  of  decorative  art,  Holbein 
stood  at  the  parting  of  the  ways  and  initiated  practices 

47 


HOLBEIN 


that,  if  they  were  saved  from  viciousness  by  his  own 
transcendant  genius,  yet  pointed  the  way  downwards 
towards  a  slough  of  despond  that  we  have  not  yet  come 
to  the  other  side  of. 

For,  just  as  in  frescoing  houses  Holbein  placed 
himself  above  the  architect,  so,  in  the  matter  of 
stained  glass,  he  divorced  himself  from  the  glass- 
maker.  The  earlier  designers  had  been  the  actual 
makers  of  the  glass,  and,  later,  they  had  at  least 
worked  in  the  shadow  of  the  church  that  they  intended 
to'  decorate.  Their  designs  were  made  for  that 
church  and  for  a  definite  window  in  that  church. 
Holbein  made  merely  "  stock  "  designs  that  any  glass- 
maker  might  buy  and  set  up  in  any  building.  Thus 
his  shields  on  designs  for  armorial  windows  were  left 
bare — and  thus  the  Stifter  of  the  Ritter  design  was  just 
a  dummy  figure  that  might  be  put  in  or  left  out. 

It  is  no  doubt  the  case  that  the  mediaeval  guild 
system,  which  in  the  time  of  Holbein  had  reached 
its  sternest  developments,  was  largely  responsible  for 
this.  No  one,  save  members  of  the  glaziers'  guild, 
might  meddle  with  stained  glass,  and  thus  the  designer 
became  of  necessity  alienated.  The  same  was  true  of 
wood-engraving  in  an  almost  more  lamentable  degree, 
and  we  have  bitter  reasons  to  regret  that  the  Holbein 
who  made  many  and  excellent  designs  for  wood- 
engravings  did  not  himself  cut  the  blocks,  so  that  it 
is  only  occasionally,  as  when  an  engraver  of  genius 
like  the  mysterious  Liitzelberger  was  set  to  cut 
part  of  the  designs  for  the  Dance  of  Death — it  is  only 
thus  occasionally  that  we  can  see  what  wood-engravings 
after  Holbein's  designs  might  have  been.  Except 
accidentally  we  cannot,  of  course,  see  the  designs 
themselves — but  from  the  results  we  can  judge  that 
Holbein  the  designer,  either  by  study  or  by  native 
genius,  had  mastered  the  essentials  of  such  design  and 

48 


HOLBEIN 


knew  just  what  a  good  wood-engraver  could  do,  and 
just  what  his  limitations  must  be.  And,  of  course,  we 
may  shudder  to  think  what  we  should  have  lost  had 
Liitzelberger  never  existed. 

I  will  return  to  the  subject  of  wood-engravings 
when,  later,  I  treat  of  the  Dance  of  Death  series,  the 
publication  of  which  was  by  accident  deferred  for  a 
decade  or  so.  I  have  found  it  convenient  to  mention 
the  designs  for  coloured  glass,  which  must  have 
occupied  at  least  the  odd  moments  of  many  years. 
And  it  is  not  very  easy  to  place  them  with  any  chrono- 
logical exactness  or  to  let  them  fall  into  place  in  between 
the  oil  paintings  as  if  they  were  the  palings  of  a  fence 
between  the  heavier  uprights.  Indeed  chronology  is 
a  thing  of  no  great  avail  to  anyone  dealing  with  the 
work  of  Holbein  in  these  particular  years  of  his  career. 
It  is  far  easier  to  divide  his  works  up  into  compart- 
ments according  to  their  "  look."  In  that  way  we  get 
the  portrait  of  Amerbach  (1519)  and  the  Dead  Man 
(1521)  as  the  supporting  parts  of  the  fence.  Without 
troubling  too  much  as  to  their  relative  sizes  or  values 
we  may  class  the  Freiburg  Altarpiece  and  the  Basle 
Altarpiece,  the  Diptych,  Mater  Dolorosa^  and  Man  of 
Sorrows,  and  the  designs  for  the  organ-case  of  Basle 
Minster  as  being,  along  with  the  designs  for  coloured 
glass,  the  rails  that  make  up  the  fence.  Further 
along  the  road  to  1526  the  fence  is  supported  by  the 
Zetter  Madonna,  the  portrait  of  Erasmus  of  1523, 
and  the  Dorothea  Offenburgs  of  1526. 

The  Basle  Altarpiece  (No.  14  in  the  Basle  Collection) 
consists  of  eight  separate  representations  of  incidents 
in  the  Passion  of  Christ.  By  means  of  extraneous  scroll 
work  and  the  shape  of  the  whole  they  are  linked 
^  together  so  as  to  form  an  architectural  rather  than  a 
decorative  unity.  The  entire  work  has,  however,  been 
so  harshly  and  glaringly  restored  that,  except  in  the 

D  49 


HOLBEIN 

form  of  a  good  reproduction,  it  is  difficult  to  get  any 
real  pleasure  from  it.  In  such  a  reproduction  there 
stand  out  at  once  the  remarkable  vividness  of  the 
realization  and  the  skilful  way  in  which,  composition 
blending  into  composition,  unity  and  balance  are 
secured  for  the  whole  work.  The  figure  of  the  Christ 
on  the  Mount  of  Olives  seems  to  lead  the  eye  naturally 
to  the  Judas,  who  delivers  his  kiss  in  the  centre  of  a 
crowd,  beneath  the  shadow  of  lances  and  pikes  ;  the 
armed  crowd  passes  again,  as  if  it  were  part  of  the  same 
procession,  into  the  crowd,  still  armed  and  topped 
with  pikes  and  lances,  before  Pilate's  seat  ;  and  this 
once  more  melts  into  the  comparative  solitude  of  the 
scourging.  Almost  precisely  the  same  effect  is  carried 
out  in  the  designs  of  the  lower  panels. 

No  doubt  the  exigencies  of  shape  in  the  altarpiece 
account  considerably  for  the  line  of  these  designs. 
The  central  picture  of  the  Freiburg  Altarpiece  is 
missing,  so  that  we  have  no  means  of  judging  whether 
in  this  work  too  Holbein  followed  out  the  same  plan, 
but  the  tilted  moon  of  the  Nativity  and  its  lighting, 
that  proceeds  apparently  from  the  new-born  child, 
prove  how  inveterately  and  how  skilfully  Holbein 
tempered  the  realism  of  his  designs  for  the  sake  of 
decorative  effect  :  the  broken  arches  of  the  palace 
prove,  in  their  case,  how  he  modified  his  decorative 
conventions  to  some  extent  in  order  to  suit  his 
literary  "  subject. 

Paintings  of  such  subjects  must  inevitably  have 
been  very  much  what  musicians  would  call  variations 
upon  a  given  theme.  The  essential  point — the  theme 
— was  the  mother  and  child  ;  the  rest  was  free  fantasia, 
and  it  was  hardly  practicable  for  any  artist  to  attempt 
to  drive  out  of  the  spectator's  mind  all  other  renderings. 
That,  in  a  "  subject  picture,"  is  what  the  painter  as 
a  rule  seeks  to  do.  But  there  are  too  many  Nativities, 
SO 


HOLBEIN 


so  that  the  artist  was  driven  to  desire  that  the  beholder 
should  exclaim,  not  "  How  true  !  "  but  "  How  beauti- 
ful !  "  We  have  ample  reason  to  believe  that  Holbein's 
idea  of  the  beautiful  was,  at  that  date,  a  pricelessly 
ornamented  Renaissance  temple  or  palace :  thus,  in 
this  Nativity,  he  welds  together  subject  and  beauty, 
producing  the  picture  of  a  child  born  in  a  manger  that 
has  been  set  up  in  a  ruined  palace.  And  we  may  well 
exclaim  :  "  How  beautiful !  " 

We  may  equally  well  exclaim  "  How  true  !  "  before 
the  little  diptych  (No.  13  of  the  Basle  Museum), 
Christ  the  Man  of  Sorrows  and  Mater  Dolorosa,  two 
small  paintings  in  shades  of  brown  which  have  de- 
scended to  the  city  of  Basle  from  the  collection  of 
Amerbach.  Here  there  is  no  attempt  made  to  recon- 
cile the  two  currents.  The  Man  of  Sorrows  is  even 
more  forcibly  set  there  than  is  the  Dead  Man,  and  it  is 
as  if  in  his  vaster  frame  there  had  been  more  room  for 
agony.  We  may,  if  we  like,  go  out  of  our  way  to 
analyse  the  literary  side  of  the  picture  ;  but  whether 
we  evolve  the  theory  that  this  is  Christ  in  the  halls 
of  Pilate  before  or  after  the  scourging,  or  whether 
we  regard  the  columns  and  arches  as  merely  creations 
of  Holbein's  fancy  to  fill  up  the  background  and  account 
for  the  glancing  light — in  whatever  way  we  satisfy 
ourselves  as  to  these  details  of  small  importance,  this 
figure  of  the  man  must  remain  for  us  the  one  reading 
that  we  can  carry  about  with  us  of  that  one  side  of 
one  incident  of  a  tremendous  legend.  Holbein  does, 
when  he  addresses  himself  to  it,  drive  home  almost 
more  than  any  other  preacher  the  fact  of  the  humanity 
of  Christ.  It  is  with  him  a  man  who  suffers,  not  an 
amiable  and  distant  divinity  whose  physical  ills  we 
may  neglect  to  the  pleasing  sound  of  church  hymns. 

A  busy  man,  Holbein  was  under  the  necessity  of 
working  quickly,  and  being  neither  a  mystic  nor  a 

SI 


HOLBEIN 

sentimentalist,  he  struck  swift  and  sure  notes.  There 
was  in  him  very  little  of  what  Schopenhauer  calls 
Christo-Germanische  Dummheit ;  he  came  before  it 
and  before  the  date  of  angels  who  are  conceived  as 
long-haired,  winged  creatures  in  immaculate  gowns — 
before  the  date  of  prettification,  in  fact.  But,  being 
a  busy  man,  he  was  naturally  unequal  in  his  work, 
so  that  the  figure  of  the  Mater  Dolorosa  is  neither  so 
arresting  nor  so  convincing  as  that  of  her  son  ;  and 
two  such  figures  as  the  SS,  George  and  Ursula  of 
Carlsruhe,  having  been  rather  terribly  overpainted, 
are  hardly  even  interesting  as  conceptions,  though  the 
face  and  upper  part  of  the  body  of  the  Ursula  have  a 
certain,  almost  mediaeval  charm.  The  curious  obtru- 
sion of  the  hips  and  bend  of  the  knees  suggest  the 
attitudes  of  the  ladies  in  Holbein's  design  for  costumes, 
and  would  seem  to  prove  that  even  so  great  a  master 
had,  at  times,  to  let  his  taste  be  perverted  so  as  to 
follow  a  fashion  of  the  day  or  year.  I  mean  that  the 
citizens'  wives  of  Basle,  walking  all  round  Holbein 
with  a  curious,  distorted  gait,  seem,  in  this  instance 
at  least,  to  have  persuaded  him  that  this  was  an  ideal 
attitude  for  the  human  form.  It  is  interesting  too 
to  observe  in  these  two  figures  that  shortness  of 
the  legs  which  is  so  pronounced  a  characteristic  of 
the  master's  earlier  work. 

I  am  inclined  to  regard  the  Hampton  Court  painting 
of  the  Risen  Christ  as  being  unjustly  attributed  to 
Holbein.  The  attitude  of  the  Christ  is,  at  the  least, 
uncharacteristic  of  the  painter,  and  the  right  arm  of 
the  Magdalen,  the  clumsy  line  of  her  shoulder,  the 
stiffness  of  her  drapery — the  stiffness  indeed  of  the  whole 
design — are  out  of  sympathy  with  any  other  paintings 
of  the  master's  manhood,  in  which  he  distinguished 
himself  almost  invariably  by  a  flow  of  line  and  com- 
position of  masses  that  carry  the  eye  from  side  to  side 
52 


HOLBEIN 

of  a  picture.  You  do  not,  I  mean,  anywhere  else 
see  a  rather  clumsily  outlined,  stiff  parallelogram  of 
light  in  the  centre  of  a  composition,  such  as  is  here 
to  be  seen  between  the  saHent  figures,  nor  indeed 
do  you  elsewhere  get  such  another  stiff  parallelogram 
of  light  as  is  formed  by  the  tomb  with  its  slab  rolled 
away.  Holbein,  however,  was  so  extremely  various 
in  his  conceptions,  and  the  authorities  who  accept 
the  painting  as  his  work  are  so  formidable  in  weight, 
as  to  make  me  speak  with  some  diffidence  ;  neverthe- 
less, the  longer  I  look  at  the  rigid  lines  of  the  picture 
the  more  reluctant  do  I  feel  to  accept  it. 

How  various  Holbein  could  be  is  proved  immediately 
in  1522,  the  year  which  saw  the  production  of  the 
SS,  George  and  Ursula,  It  saw  also  the  birth  of  the 
Virgin  of  Solothurn^  a  picture  so  beautiful  in  itself  that, 
when  all  the  glamour  of  its  recovery  from  a  dishonoured 
ruin  beneath  painter's  floor  boards  is  allowed  for,  and 
when  too  all  has  been  allowed  for  in  the  very  careful 
and  well-intentioned  restorations  that  it  necessarily 
underwent — ^when,  in  fact,  everything  that  need  be 
is  allowed  for,  it  remains  one  of  the  finest  of 
Holbeins. 

The  germ  of  this  design  is  to  be  found  in  the 
beautiful  little  woodcut  on  the  reverse  title-page  of 
the  "  Stadtrechte  und  Statuten  der  loeblichen  Stadt 
Freiburg.^^  This  was  published  in  1520  and  seems  to 
prove  that  Holbein  carried  about  with  him  the  ideas 
of  favourite  designs,  and  that,  having,  as  it  were, 
wasted  this  lovely  little  conception  on  an  obscure 
woodcut,  he  wished  once  more  to  bring  it  gloriously 
into  the  daylight.  This  is  perhaps  merely  a  romantic 
way  of  putting  the  fact  that,  as  many  other  busy 
painters  have  done,  Holbein  sometimes  elaborated 
rough  designs  into  finished  pictures  and  that  here  we 
are  able  to  identify  a  first  design — to  catch  him  in  the 

S3 


HOLBEIN 

act.  The  woodcut  I  am  inclined  to  think  more 
charming  in  its  spontaneity  than  is  the  design  of  the 
picture.  It  has  at  least  a  greater  unity  and  more 
balance  ;  for  in  the  Solothurn  Virgin  the  figure  of 
St.  Ursus  of  Thebes — a  somewhat  stiff  and  conventional 
creation — stands  somewhat  apart  from  the  entwined 
group  of  the  Virgin  and  St.  Martin.  The  sinuous  lines 
of  their  robes  flow  one  into  another  ;  the  up-and-down 
figure  of  the  knight  is  slightly  discordant  in  the  whole 
composition.  But,  apart  from  this,  and  from. the  head 
of  the  suppliant  which  Holbein  introduces  as  discreetly 
as  is  feasible,  the  picture  is  one  of  those  very  lovely 
conceptions  about  which  it  is  difficult  to  say  very  much. 
There  it  is  :  you  may  look  at  it  for  an  hour,  for  a 
morning,  or  for  a  day  or  so  on  end,  and  always  with 
increasing  satisfaction.  It  belongs,  like  all  the  best  of 
Holbein's  work,  to  a  special  class  of  picture.  It  is 
not  immediately  very  striking  either  in  lighting  or  in 
colour,  either  in  dramatic  gesture  or  astonishing 
painting.  But  there  is  no  false  drawing,  as  there  is  no 
exaggerated  drawing,  and  there  is  neither  false  lighting 
nor  false  painting. 

The  whole  mood  of  the  picture,  in  inception  as  in 
execution,  is  one  of  entire  tranquillity,  so  that  the 
painted  Virgin  seems  to  be  as  sure  of  achieving  a 
successful  motherhood  as  was  Holbein  of  turning  out 
a  masterpiece.  That  he  was  a  very  wonderful  man  is 
proved  by  his  so  wonderfully  overcoming  the  con- 
ditions of  the  painting,  since  the  vaulted  and  barred 
niche  points  to  the  fact  that  the  picture  was  intended 
to  fill  a  given  and  unlovely  place,  whilst  the  head  of 
the  suppliant  would  seem  to  prove  that  the  picture  was 
commissioned  by  some  wealthy  person  with  something 
on  his  conscience.  And  it  must  have  meant  either 
some  skill  in  argument  or  some  convicting  power  of 
personality  that  the  artist  should  have  been  able  to 

54 


HOLBEIN 

save  the  unity  of  his  httle  Freiburg  design — that,  in 
fact,  he  should  have  been  able  to  persuade  the  donor 
to  make  so  unobtrusive  an  appearance  in  the  v^ork. 

The  surprising  adventures  of  the  picture,  identi- 
fications of  the  donor  and  even  of  the  model  for  the 
Virgin,  the  strange  circumstances  of  the  discovery, 
of  the  never  to  be  sufficiently  praised  industry  of  the 
recoverer — all  these  things  are  part  of  the  legends 
of  art,  and  add  to  the  hopefulness  of  those  romantic 
souls  who  dream  of  one  day  discovering  inestimable 
art-treasures  beneath  the  floors  of  their  bedrooms  or  in 
deserted  granaries.  Inasmuch  as  such  things  prevent 
most  of  us  from  looking  at  a  picture  as  a  picture,  making 
us  produce  mouths  round  w^ith  astonishment  as  if  the 
object  gazed  at  were  a  captive  released  from  Barbary 
or  some  similar  wonder,  I  dislike  recounting  them. 
But  the  faith  and  gallant  doggedness  of  Mr.  Zetter, 
who  nosed  out  the  picture  from  beneath  dishonouring 
rubbish,  are  so  worthy  of  celebration  that  I  cannot 
refrain  from  referring  such  of  my  readers  as  care  about 
the  matter  to  Mr.  Zetter-Collin's  "  Die  Zetter' sche 
Madonna  von  Solothurn  :  Geschichte  und  Originalquellen. 
Solothurn,  1902."  Here  will  be  found  recorded  all  the 
possible  ana  of  the  subject. 

During  this  period — to  be  precise,  from  June  1521 
until  October  1522 — Holbein  was  engaged  upon  one 
of  those  tasks  which,  along  with  the  Hertenstein 
frescoes,  the  Bar  table,  and  the  "  Dance  of  Death," 
remained  for  some  subsequent  centuries  wonders  of  the" 
world.  This  was  the  decoration  of  the  council  chamber 
in  the  Basle  Rath-haus.  The  frescoes  themselves  have 
vanished,  so  that  no  man  living  has  seen  more  than 
patches  of  colour  upon  the  walls  :  the  pictures  are  in 
that  heaven  of  lost  masterpieces  where,  perhaps,  we 
may  one  day  see  the  campanile  of  Venice,  the  arms 
of  the  Venus  of  Milo,  or  the  seven-branched  candle- 

55 


HOLBEIN 

stick  of  the  Temple  of  Solomon.  Vigorous  and  splendid 
sketches  remain,  some  copies  and  many  descriptions — 
but  these  afford  us  very  little  idea  of  what  may  have 
been  the  actual  effect  of  the  decorations,  as  decorations. 

Regarded  theoretically  they  cannot  have  been 
perfect  or  even  desirable  :  here  again  plain  walls  were 
made  to  look  like  anything  else  but  walls.  But  no  doubt 
they  were  very  wonderful  things  whilst  they  still  existed. 

Nevertheless  I  cannot  resist  a  feeling  of  private  but 
intimate  relief  that  these  tremendous  tours  de  force 
are  left  to  our  imaginings.  We  lose  them— but  we 
gain  a  Holbein  whom  we  can  more  fearlessly  enjoy. 
For,  supposing  these  things  with  their  nine  days' 
wonder  of  invention  that  Holbein  shared  with  many 
commoner  men  and  set  working  for  the  gratification 
of  every  commoner  man — supposing  these  extremely 
wonderful  designs  still  existed,  the  far  greater  Holbein 
— the  Holbein  of  the  one  or  two  Madonnas  and  of 
the  innumerable  portraits  in  oil  or  in  silverpoint — 
the  Holbein  whose  works  place  him  side  by  side  with 
the  highest  artists,  in  that  highest  of  all  arts,  the  art 
of  portraiture — that  tranquil  and  assured  master  must 
have  been  obscured.  Those  of  us  who  loved  his 
greater  works  must,  in  the  nature  of  things,  have  been 
accused  of  paradox  flinging  :  the  great  Public  must  have 
called  out  :  "  Look  at  that  wonderful  invention  : 
that  compassionate  executioner  with  the  magnifying 
glass,  seeking  to  take  out  his  victim's  eye  with  as  little 
brutality  as  might  be  !  "  And  beside  that  attraction 
the  charms  of  Christina  of  Milan  or  all  the  sketches 
at  Windsor  would  be  praised  in  vain.  We  should  have 
gained  another  Shakespeare  rich  in  the  production  of 
anecdote,  we  might  have  lost  some  of  our  love  for  an 
artist  incomparable  for  his  holding  the  mirror  up  to 
the  men  and  women  of  his  wonderful  age. 

So  that,  one  way  with  another,  we  may  at  least 

S6 


Hanfstaenf> 


HOLBEIN 

console  ourselves  for  the  loss  of  these  decorations 
in  the  thought  that  they  no  longer  obscure  what  was 
the  real  and  true  greatness  of  a  many-sided  man. 
The  decorations  came  to  an  end  late  in  1522,  when 
only  part  of  the  council  chamber  was  finished. 
Holbein,  it  is  recorded  to  the  honour  of  the  city  of 
Basle,  had  contracted  to  complete  the  work  :  but 
having  been  paid  all  the  money  due  to  him  and  having 
put  into  the  room  as  much  work  as  he  deemed  fitting 
or  reasonable,  he  petitioned  to  be  released  from  his 
bargain  or  granted  a  further  sum  for  its  completion. 
The  councillors  recognized  his  claims  and,  having  at 
that  date  little  money  to  spare,  released  the  painter 
without  giving  a  further  commission. 

The  career  of  Holbein  for  the  next  year  or  so 
takes  one  of  its  characteristic  dips  into  the  sands  of 
oblivion.  Except  for  several  portraits  of  Erasmus 
we  have  little  or  no  actually  dated  matter  to  go 
upon.  The  very  reasonable  theory  is  that  in  or  about 
1523  he  travelled  into  France,  going  apparently  with 
the  portrait  that  Erasmus  was  sending  to  Amerbach. 
The  beloved  Bonifacius  was  then  studying  at  Avignon  : 
perhaps  the  attractions  of  his  society,  perhaps  the 
troublous  times  that  made  themselves  felt  rather 
early  in  Basle,  caused  Holbein  to  leave  Basle  and  travel 
across  France.  We  have  one  fairly  certain  trace  of 
his  itinerary  in  the  little  drawings  from  the  painted 
monuments  of  the  Duke  and  Duchess  Jean  de  Berry 
in  the  cathedral  at  Bourges,  which  he  must  have  visited. 
Perhaps,  too,  the  fact  that  the  Dance  of  Death  was 
eventually  published  by  the  brothers  Trechsel  of 
Lyons  would  seem  to  prove  that  Holbein's  history  had 
repeated  itself — that,  even  as  in  the  first  instance 
he  had  come  to  Basle  in  order  to  obtain  work  from  the 
printer  Frobenius,  he  had  now  come  to  the  south  of 
France  on  such  another  errand.    Perhaps  the  mere 

57 


HOLBEIN 


fact  that  Holbein  found  time  to  execute  so  many 
portraits  of  Erasmus — the  Louvre  portrait,  the  one 
in  Basle,  which  is  no  doubt  what  Holbein  carried  to 
Avignon,  the  little  round  design  cut  in  wood  by 
Liitzelberger,  and  the  one  for  a  diptych  containing  a 
companion  portrait  of  Frobenius  which  has  now  dis- 
appeared— this  fact  of  his  executing  so  many  portraits 
of  the  same  great  man  might  lead  to  the  idea  that 
his  other  sources  of  employment  were  failing.  Indeed, 
of  the  years  1524-25  we  find  no  signed  traces  what- 
ever. 

In  1523  the  great  troubles  and  upheavals  that  saw 
Rome  herself  sacked  by  Lutheran  mercenaries  were 
still  comparatively  at  a  distance.  Writing  of  that 
year,  one  of  the  greatest  of  all  the  rather  unsavoury 
politicians  of  that  wonderful  century  sums  up  the 
topics  that  were  then  in  men's  minds  :  "  By 
the  space  of  xvii  hole  wekes  ...  we  communyd  of 
warre  pease  Stryfe  contencyon  debatte  murmure 
grudge  Riches  pouerte  penury  trowth  falsehode 
Justyce  equyte  discayte  oppreseyon  Magnanymyte 
actyuyte  force  attempraunce  Treason  murder  Felonye 
consyliacyon  and  also  how  a  commune  welth  myght 
be  edifyed  and  continuyid  within  our  Realme.  How^- 
beyt  in  conclusyon  wee  haue  done  as  our  predecessors 
haue  been  wont  to  doo  that  ys  to  say,  as  well  as  wee 
myght  and  lefte  where  we  begann.  .  .  .  Whe  haue 
in  our  parlyament  grauntyd  vnto  the  Kynges  highnes 
a  ryght  large  subsydye  the  lyke  whereof  was  newer 
graunted  in  this  realme." 

The  point  about  this  letter,  which  is  addressed  to 
Cromwell's  "  especial  and  entyrelye  belouyd  Frende 
Jno  Creke  in  Bilbowe  in  Biscaye,"  is  precisely  that  at 
that  date  there  was  no  burning  question  in  England. 
Every  possible  subject  was  discussed  with  academic 
calmness,  and  the  country  appeared  to  be  outside  the 
58 


HOLBEIN 

European  storm-centre.  And  such  letters  went  all 
over  Europe  in  these  years,  holding  out  the  promise 
of  a  halcyon  state  to  such  workers  as  Holbein  whose 
means  of  subsistence  vanished  in  storms  like  that  of 
the  Peasants'  War,  and  whose  very  works  were  de- 
stroyed out  of  all  the  churches  of  Protestantism. 
And  not  only  in  Protestant  lands,  since  even  such 
a  Pontiff  of  the  plastic  arts  as  Michel  Angelo  was  soon 
to  find  out  that  the  Pontiff  of  the  Church  deemed  it 
expedient  to  attend  almost  more  to  the  affairs  of  his 
cure  than  to  marbles,  however  deathless. 

Of  these  bad  times  for  artists  we  can  find,  as  I 
have  said,  little  or  no  trace  in  the  career  of  Holbein — 
there  are  no  pictures  of  his  bearing  the  actual  dates 
1524  or  1525.  It  may  be  convenient  therefore  to 
speak  here  of  the  Dance  of  Death  series  and  the  Death 
Alphabet,  although  the  Trechsels  did  not  actually 
publish  the  former  until  many  years  had  elapsed. 
This  is  another  of  Holbein's  wonder-works.  It 
achieved  and  maintained  a  European  celebrity 
such  as  perhaps  no  other  work  of  art  ever  did.  The 
only  parallels  to  it  that  occur  at  all  immediately  to 
one  are  Bunyan's  "Pilgrim's  Progress"  in  Western, 
and  the  "  Labyrinth  "  of  Comenius  in  Eastern 
Europe  ;  and  these  two  appeal  to  a  comparatively 
limited  class  of  races,  however  widespread.  It  has 
struck  straight  at  the  hearts  of  innumerable  races, 
at  the  hearts  of  the  lowest  of  peasants  as  at  those  of 
the  greatest  of  artists.  It  was  carried  by  chap-book 
pedlars  to  the  remotest  hovels  of  the  earth,  and 
Rubens  declared  that  from  it  he  had  his  earliest  lessons 
in  drawing — just  as  the  first  master  of  Michel  Angelo 
was,  vicariously,  Martin  Schongauer. 

It  is  easy  to  say  that  the  appeal  of  the  series  came 
from  its  subject,  and  that  its  subject  had  been  the 
common  property  of  the  mediaeval  centuries.  Yet 

59 


HOLBEIN 

the  mere  fact  that  of  so  many  Gesta  Mortis  only  this 
of  Holbein's  held  the  popular  imagination  with  any 
lasting  firmness,  the  fact  that  it  was  the  selected 
version  of  all  the  versions,  would  go  to  prove  that  it 
was  some  sort  of  technical  excellence,  some  sort  of 
technical  appeal  that  caused  its  apotheosis.  And 
excellent  indeed  is  almost  every  one  of  these  woodcuts — 
excellent  in  the  simplicity  of  design  which  recognizes 
so  truly  what  the  thick,  unctuous  line  of  the  wood- 
engraver  can  do  ;  excellent  in  the  placing  of  each  little 
subject  on  the  block  ;  excellent  in  the  way  in  which 
each  figure  stands  upon  its  legs  ;  and  above  all,  excel- 
lent in  the  appeal  to  the  eye,  in  the  "  composition  " 
of  each  subject. 

It  is,  of  course,  open  to  one  to  say  that  story- 
telling is  the  least  of  all  the  departments  of  designing. 
But  when  once  such  an  artist  as  Holbein  sets  himself  to 
tell  a  story,  the  matter  becomes  comparatively  un- 
important. He  was  so  true  to  himself  that  his 
designs  had  the  proper,  the  individual  "  look,"  whether 
he  were  putting  on  paper  something  so  purely  arbitrary 
as  the  design  for  a  coat-of-arms,  or  the  figure  of  Death 
driving  a  weapon  through  a  soldier.  The  subject 
simply  did  not  hinder  him  :  he  could  employ  any 
object  so  as  to  form  an  integral  part  of  his  decorative 
purpose.  And,  what  is  still  more  to  the  point, 
having  set  himself  to  tell  a  story,  he  did  tell  it  with  a 
quite  amazing  lucidity.  The  detail  essential  to  his 
idea  is  always  what  strikes  the  eye  first — or  rather  it 
is  "  led  up  to  "  as  skilfully  as  in  the  denouement  of  a 
good  French  caste.  That  is,  of  course,  one  of  the 
lower  merits  :  but  that  he  took  so  much  trouble  over 
it  is  proof  of  how  conscientious  a  worker  he  was — of 
how  amply  he  deserved  the  enormous  popularity  that 
became  his. 

I  have  hardly  space  here  to  trace  the  evolution  of 

60 


I  'I 


HOLBEIN 

the  idea  of  the  ^odtentanz.  It  originated,  how  tar 
back  we  cannot  tell,  in  a  universal,  and  no  doubt 
praiseworthy,  religious  desire  of  "  rubbing  in,"  to 
each  mortal  creature,  the  fact  that  he  or  she  must  die. 
It  was  a  matter  not  merely  of  chalking  upon,  or  carving 
out  of,  a  wall  :  "  Remember,  O  man,  that  thou 
art  mortal  " — a  lesson  that  each  reader,  like  each  hearer 
of  a  sermon,  was  apt  to  apply  rather  to  his  neighbour 
than  to  himself.  The  framer  or  inventor  of  a  Tlodten- 
tanz  wished  to  bring  the  moral  home  to  each  beholder, 
and  in  order  to  do  this  he  exhausted  his  knowledge 
of  the  human  avocations  or  estates.  Thus  a  butcher 
who  received  a  grim  joy  at  seeing  his  friend  the  horse- 
merchant,  the  lacemaker,  or  the  coney-catcher  in 
the  arms  of  a  corpse,  was  expected  to  receive  a  shock 
and  ensue  no  doubt  a  moral  purging  at  the  spectacle 
of  the  representation  of  all  Butcherdom  dancing  in 
the  embrace  of  a  phantom  ox-slaughterer.  For,  in 
the  original  conception  of  a  Todtentanz,  each  man  or 
woman  danced,  not  with  Death  the  Abstraction,  but 
with  a  dead  mortal  of  his  own  kidney.  Of  such 
"  dances  "  there  were  many  on  the  walls  of  cloisters 
all  over  Europe  :  at  Basle  itself  there  is  still  one  to 
be  seen — and  no  doubt  such  perpetrations  and  the 
fact  that  they  were  continually  beneath  the  eyes 
of  men  during  successive  generations  did  have  a 
considerable  influence  on  the  trend  of  thought. 
They  must,  I  mean,  have  smitten  very  hard  the  poetic 
and  imaginative  few  during  their  childhoods.  Perhaps 
to  them  may  be  ascribed  the  continual  preoccupation 
of  the  mind  of  Montaigne  with  one  idea — that  of 
dodging  the  fear  of  death  when  it  came  by  living  all  his 
days  in  a  state  of  mitigated  terror. 

In  Holbein  the  preoccupation  was  perhaps  natural, 
since  his  name  means  "  Skull,"  and  at  times,  as  in  the 
picture  of  T^he  Ambassadors^  he  proved  that  he  was 

6i 


HOLBEIN 

not  oblivious  of  the  fact.  The  "  vein  "  cropped  up- 
from  time  to  time  in  his  later  v^orks  :  thus  in  the 
rather  inferior  and  very  much  damaged  portrait  of 
Sir  Brian  Tuke,  now  at  Munich,  the  hour-glass  is  in  the 
front  of  the  picture,  v^hilst  the  background  is  filled 
by  a  skeleton  presentation  of  Death  w^ith  his  lethal 
instrument.  We  might  almost  regard  the  great 
Meier  Madonna  as  containing  one  more  of  these 
warnings,  since,  with  her  shroud  half  concealing  her 
face,  behind  the  living  wife  kneels  the  dead  Dorothea 
Kannegiesser  whom  Holbein  had  so  beautifully  painted 
.  a  decade  before. 

With  this  famous  Madonna  and  what  I  am  tempted 
to  call  the  infamous  portraits  of  Dorothea  Offenburg, 
Holbein  seems  once  more  to  re-emerge  from  the  shades 
into  the  Basle  of  1526.  The  Madonna  is  another  of 
the  Holbeins  that  has  a  wonder  "  attaching  to  it. 
For  centuries  the  Dresden  copy  was  accredited  the 
real  work  :  for  a  long  time  it  was  considered  to  be  the 
lost  Household  of  Sir  Thomas  More,  Then  came  the 
discovery  in  Paris  in  1822  of  the  real  picture. 

It  is  really  neither  here  nor  there  whether  the 
Dresden  picture  be  a  copy  by  another  artist  or  a 
replica  by  Holbein  himself.  It  is  sufficient  that, 
until  one  has  seen  the  Darmstadt  picture,  one  may 
hold  the  Dresden  version  to  be  another  work  of  which 
ne  plus  ultra  might  be  written.  But,  if  one  travels 
swiftly  from  one  picture  to  the  other,  one  is  conscious 
of  a  strange  sensation — of  the  deepening  of  a  sensation. 
The  Dresden  Madonna  is  prettified  :  the  Darmstadt 
is  overwhelming.  The  Dresden  has  retired,  as  it  were, 
on  to  a  comparatively  commonplace  footing  :  the 
Darmstadt  masterpiece  comes  right  forward.  The 
Dresden  picture  one  looks  at  :  one  seems  to  be  actually 
in  the  one  at  Darmstadt. 

And  indeed  this  last  is  the  "  note  "  of  the  real 

62 


HOLBEIN 

picture  :  it  is  absolutely  intimate  :  it  is  precisely  the 
Household  of  a  Man  in  which  the  Mother  of  God 
moves  as  in  the  midst  of  her  family  and  ours.  The 
mere  crumpling  of  the  carpet  which  in  the  other 
version  is  straightened  out  and  rather  ugly — that 
detail  adds  to  the  intimate  note — even  the  comparative 
ill-favouredness  of  the  Madonna  adds  to  it.  The  other 
picture  seems  to  have  been  altered  to  satisfy  the 
criticism  of  a  commonplace  mind.  One  seems  to  have 
heard  a  voice  say  before  the  Darmstadt  picture  :  "  The 
Madonna  is  too  familiar  ;  she  should  be  idealized  ; 
Dorothea  is  too  ugly  and  grim,  tone  her  down  ;  the 
alcove  is  too  low  to  be  elegant  !  "  And  either  some 
very  clever  copyist,  or  Holbein  in  one  of  his  more 
dangerous  moods,  did  this  thing. 

It  damages  the  lines  of  the  composition  as  much  as 
it  spoils  the  poetry  of  the  subject  ;  it  worries  with 
its  interpolated  shadows  the  eye  which  rests  so  grate- 
fully upon  the  lighter  surface  of  the  real  picture ; 
it  achieves  a  comparatively  cheap,  "  anybody's " 
dramatic  effect  at  the  expense  of  that  very  tranquillity 
which  is  the  highest  of  Holbein's  qualities — at  the 
expense  of  that  very  tranquillity  which  is,  in  a  tiresome 
and  sad  world,  the  most  blessed  gift  which  Holbein 
had  to  bestow  on  humanity.  It  is,  the  Dresden 
Madonna^  a  picture  we  are  proud  to  admire.  The 
picture  at  Darmstadt  is  one  that,  having  stood  our 
little  time  before,  we  carry  away  with  us  to  be  a  consoler 
for  ever  in  those  moments  when  we  are  so  happy 
as  to  call  it  to  mind.  The  two  Dorothea  Ojfenburgs 
are  in  their  way  works  as  fine.  At  this  time  Holbein 
had  reached  a  level  of  skill  that  he  never  much  sur- 
passed, from  which,  if  anything,  he  declined  slightly 
into  mannerisms.  At  any  rate  many  of  his  later 
portraits  have  a  mellowness  which,  if  one  happens  to 
be  in  the  mood  for  something  very  actual,  sends  us 

63 


HOLBEIN 

back  gratefully  to  the  Lats  Corinthiaca,  It  has  not, 
of  course,  the  tremendous  force  of  the  portrait  of 
Holbein's  wife  and  children  :  it  is,  in  a  sense,  more 
amateurish — or  rather  more  experimental — as  a  paint- 
ing than  the  Christina  of  Milan  :  but  in  its  beautiful 
lines  and  masses,  its  fresh  and  vivid  colour,  and  its 
wonderfully  actual  drawing — its  "  motion  " — it  has 
qualities  that  they  have  not.  It  stands,  to  my  mind, 
along  with  the  Louvre  portrait  of  Erasmus  :  it  has 
that  quality  of  dramatic  interruption  of  which  I  have 
spoken  in  writing  of  the  portrait  of  Amerbach. 

The  Dorothea  as  Venus  has  all  these  qualities  in  a 
lesser  degree  :  the  painting  is  less  vivid,  the  drawing 
less  convincing,  the  possibilities  of  the  face — as  if 
Holbein  at  that  time  had  not  so  well  studied  it — are 
made  less  of,  the  lines  of  the  shoulders  are  less  arrest- 
ingly  sumptuous  :  it  is,  as  it  were,  a  Dresden  version 
to  the  Darmstadt  of  the  Lais — and  it  seems  to  me  to 
be  almost  an  argument  that  both  the  Meier  Mado7inas 
may  be  by  Holbein. 

That,  however,  is  mere  phantasy.  What  is  inte- 
resting is  that  by  this  time  Holbein,  in  his  dated 
paintings,  seems  to  have  got  rid  of  the  trick  of  loading 
his  backgrounds  with  Renaissance  architecture  and 
what  not.  The  background  of  the  D^LimstSidt Madonna 
is  nearly  simplicity  itself  ;  behind  the  head  of  Erasmus 
is  nothing  but  a  green  surface  with  some  decorative 
stars  ;  behind  the  Dorotheas  is  merely  a  curtain.  He 
seems  to  have  realized  that,  by  this  time,  his  marvellous 
painting  was  a  tower  in  itself,  and  from  this  date  on- 
ward it  is  only  in  "  display  "  portraits  that  he  troubles 
himself  to  be  very  elaborate. 

These,  it  is  significant  to  observe,  are,  firstly,  The 
Household  of  Sir  Thomas  More,  with  which  he  "  intro- 
duced "  himself  to  the  English  on  his  first  visit  ; 
secondly,  the  portrait  of  Gisze,  with  which  he  "  intro- 

64 


HOLBEIN 

duced  "  himself,  equally,  to  the  German  merchants 
of  the  Steelyard  on  his  second  coming  here.  The 
Henries  VII  and  VIII  and  their  Consorts  was  also  by 
way  of  being  an  introduction,  and  possibly  also  the 
Ambassadors,  since  the  two  sitters  might  serve  to 
spread  his  fame  into  whatever  mysterious  court  they 
were  accredited  from.  At  any  rate,  from  this  time 
onward,  except  in  such  special  cases,  the  master  seems 
to  have  thrown  his  glove  down  to  posterity  :  the 
human  face,  the  human  shape,  these  were  the  "  sub- 
jects "  with  which  he  was  to  make  his  appeal.  And 
this  "  subject  "  being  the  simplest  and  the  most 
difficult  with  which  a  painter  can  deal,  it  seems  to 
follow  that  the  achievement  is  the  highest  possible. 
It  takes  to  itself  no  adventitious  aids  :  it  relies  upon 
painting  pure  and  simple. 


£ 


65 


VI 

IN  the  late  summer  of  1526  Holbein  left  Basle 
for  England.  His  motives  for  so  doing  are  not 
of  the  first  importance  and  they  have  been 
fully  discussed  by  many  people.  Some  will  have  it 
that  he  was  unhappy  at  home  ;  some  that  his  im- 
broglio with  Dorothea  Offenburg  drove  him  away. 
One  authority  credits  him  with  an  invitation  to  England 
from  a  great  English  lord  :  it  seems  more  probable 
that  More  called  to  him.  No  doubt,  too,  times  in 
Basle  were  very  evil  for  him,  since  to  all  other  painters 
they  were  very  evil.  Already  painting  was  an  art  in 
disrepute  in  a  Basle  coming  more  and  more  rapidly 
under  the  sway  of  Lutheranism.  Holbein,  as  I  have 
said,  served  both  masters  impartially — for  the  one 
side  he  painted  the  Madonna,  for  the  other  he  illus- 
trated pamphlets  so  violent  that  they  must  needs  be 
burned.  But  for  the  moment  Lutheranism  offered 
only  pamphlets.  To  find  room  for  paintings,  Holbein 
must  find  a  land  where  there  were  convents  still  and 
churches  not  whitewashed.  It  is  an  interesting  little 
incident,  as  showing  Holbein  actually  in  contact  with 
the  troubles  of  his  time,  that,  when  he  claimed  the 
painting  materials — and  more  particularly  the  gold — 
that  his  father  had  left  in  a  monastery  he  was  painting 
in  before  his  death,  the  answer  he  received  was  that  the 
monastery  had  been  burned  by  the  peasants  and  that 
if  Holbein  desired  the  gold  he  must  go  seek  it  amid  the 
ashes. 
66 


HOLBEIN 

Practically  the  only  other  Basle  evidences  of  his 
life — save  for  the  letter  from  Erasmus — are  the 
Dorothea  pictures.  One  may  read  into  them  v^hat 
one  likes.  It  is  usual  to  consider  that,  since  Holbein 
painted  her  first  as  Venus  and  then  as  Lais^  he  must 
first  have  been  guilelessly  in  love  with  her,  and  then 
have  turned  upon  his  mistress.  The  amiable  apologists 
for  Holbein  write  eloquently  upon  the  wrongs  that  he 
must  have  suffered  at  her  pretty  but  itching  palms. 
But  it  has  always  seemed  to  me  that  if  a  man  has 
enjoyed  a  woman's  favours,  it  is  discreditable  of  him 
afterwards  to  call  her  even  well-deserved  names, 
however  excellent  an  organ  his  voice  may  be,  and  if  I 
were  anxious  to  apologize  for  the  painter,  I  should 
simply  adopt  another  line.  I  mean  that  there  is  no 
documentary  evidence  to  connect  Holbein  with 
Dorothea  :  thus  the  portraits  may  have  been  com- 
missioned by  some  other  of  the  very  many  ill-used 
lovers  of  the  thus  immortalized  and  beautiful  Lais. 

I  do  not  know  that  it  is  a  matter  of  much  import- 
ance. Holbein  cannot  very  easily  be  whitewashed, 
since  his  will  gives  indisputable  evidence  of  his  having 
led  a  not  strictly  regular  life  in  this  country.  Such 
things,  of  course,  were  not  uncommon  in  those 
distant  days,  and  Holbein  might  plead  the  "  artistic 
temperament  "  to-day.  And  gossip  says  too  that  he 
was  "  unhappy  at  home  " — so  that  apparently  for  once 
the  desire  of  the  critic  to  limit  his  remarks  to  the  man's 
work,  and  the  desire  of  the  world  and  his  wife  to 
know  about  everything  else,  may  be  brought  to  coin- 
cide. For  it  would  appear  that  the  less  we  say  about 
Holbein  the  man — the  better. 

It  is,  of  course,  true  that  the  important  thing  about 
a  picture  is  how  it  is  painted,  and  that  the  subject 
matters,  by  comparison,  very  little.  Nevertheless  it 
is  an  added,  extraneous  pleasure — a  pleasure  added 

67 


HOLBEIN 

rather  to  what  is  called  belles  lettres  than  to  the  une 
arts — ^when  such  a  painter  as  Holbein  comes  upon 
"  interesting  sitters."  I  mean  that  the  charm  of 
Roper's  "  Life  of  Sir  Thomas  More  "  is  infinitely 
enhanced  by  looking  at  Holbein's  Household — ^just 
as  the  interest  of  the  whole  history  of  the  period  is 
made  alive  for  us  by  Holbein's  portraits  of  Henry  VHI's 
court.  Without  the  court  to  draw,  painting  only 
peasants  or  fishwives,  Holbein  would  have  been  a 
painter  just  as  great.  Henry  VHI  and  his  men  would 
be  lifeless  without  Holbein.  You  have  only  to 
think  how  comparatively  cold  we  are  left  by  the  name, 
say,  of  Edward  HI,  a  great  king  surrounded  by  great 
men  in  a  stirring  period.  No  visual  image  comes  to 
the  mind's  eye  ;  at  most  we  see,  imaginatively,  coins 
and  the  seals  that  depend  from  charters.  Thus,  if 
oblivion  be  not  a  boon,  an  age  may  be  thankful  for 
such  artists  as  Holbein.  That  most  wonderful  age 
in  which  he  lived  seemed,  too,  to  be  well  aware  of  it 
— since  so  many  of  the  great  sought  the  immortality 
that  his  hand  was  to  confer. 

We  who  come  after  may  well  be  thankful  that 
Holbein  paid  when  he  did  his  first  short  visit  to  this 
country.  Along  with  the  portraits  of  the  splendid 
opportunists  who  flourished  or  fell  when  the  end  of 
the  old  world  came  at  the  fall  of  More,  he  has  left  us 
some  at  least  of  the  earlier  and  more  attractive  men 
of  doomed  principles.  Along  with  More's  there 
decorated  then  the  page  of  English  history  the  name  of 
Warham,  who,  for  mellow  humanitarianism,  exceeded 
Cranmer,  his  successor,  as  far  as  More  exceeded 
Thomas  Cromwell  in  the  familiar  virtues — and  Fisher, 
Bishop  of  Rochester,  who  as  far  exceeded  the  later 
Gardiner.  Being  men  of  principle,  set  in  high  places, 
these  were  doomed  to  tragedy  ;  and,  if  Warham  died 
actually  in  his  bed,  it  needs  only  Holbein's  portrait 
68 


Hanfstaengl. 


uNlVLRSny  OF 


HOLBEIN 

to  assure  us  that,  if  the  shadows  of  the  future  can  still 
affect  us  on  our  last  pillows,  this  great  man  saw,  on 
his  deathbed,  things  enough  to  make  him  haggard. 
Fisher's  head  has  about  its  eyes  a  greater  intrepidity — 
but  the  expression  on  both  is  the  same  ;  and  in  these 
two  heads  we  may  see  very  well  how  two  great  men 
envisaged  their  stormy  times. 

Of  the  portrait  of  Warham  there  are  two  copies 
in  oil  extant — both  apparently  by  Holbein,  the  one  in 
the  Louvre,  the  other  at  Lambeth  :  the  latter  is,  I 
think,  the  finer  example.  The  oil  picture  of  the 
Household  of  More  has,  of  course,  vanished  ;  but  the 
drawing,  a  mere  sketch  with  annotations  by  More,  is  in 
Basle,  and  there  are  studies  for  the  heads  at  Windsor. 
Perhaps,  however,  the  best  portrait-picture  of  this 
visit  to  England  is  the  Dresden  T^homas  and  John 
Godsalve,  in  which  the  head  of  the  elder  man  has 
always  appeared  to  me  to  be  one  of  the  finest  pieces 
of  Holbein's  painting.  The  Windsor  portrait  of 
Sir  Henry  Guildford  is  more  generally  preferred  ;  to 
my  taste  it  is  too  much  overloaded  with  decoration — 
though  this  was  probably  to  the  taste  of  Sir  Henry,  a 
commonplace  gentleman  whose  successful  career  was 
much  aided  by  the  king's  friendship,  and  whose  position 
at  court  made  him  to  a  large  extent  arbiter  elegantiarum. 
Thus  the  portrait  has  some  of  the  nature  of  a  "  display  " 
picture. 

But  upon  the  whole,  and  if  no  question  of  pecuniary 
value  or  labour  expended  need  influence,  I  should  be 
inclined  to  prefer  to  either,  the  wonderful,  alert 
Portrait  of  an  Englishwoman^  in  two  chalks,  in  Basle,  or 
the  almost  more  wonderful  body-colour  Portrait  of 
an  Englishman  in  the  Berlin  Royal  Cabinet.  These 
little  drawings  of  an  hour  or  so  are  so  inexpressibly 
alive  in  every  touch  that  the  more  minutely  you 
examine  them,  the  more  excited  you  will  become. 

69 


HOLBEIN 

In  the  finished  paintings  one  is  presented  with  a 
mystery  :  in  these  drawings  one  has  the  very  heart  of 
the  secret.  Each  stroke  that  one  looks  at  seems  to 
unfold  an  envelope  of  the  bud — at  each  unfolding 
one  discovers  that  the  secret  lies  a  little  deeper.  I 
suppose  Holbein  himself  could  not  have  told  how  it 
was  done. 

But,  of  course,  these  drawings  and  all  the  earlier 
paintings  take,  as  it  were,  their  hats  off  to  the 
portrait  of  Holbein's  wife  and  children.  As  in  the 
case  of  most  of  the  really  impressive  portraits  of 
the  world,  there  is  here  no  background,  no  detailed 
accessory  to  worry  the  beholder's  eye.  The  figures  in 
the  picture  exist  just  as  at  first  sight  a  great  human 
individuality  exists.  One  has  no  eyes  for  the  chair 
he  sits  in  nor  much  for  the  kind  of  clothes  he  may 
wear.  He  overcomes  these  things  and  makes  them  no 
part  of  his  individuality  that  they  are  as  much  taken 
for  granted  as  are  the  number  of  his  fingers.  And  it  is 
precisely  the  property  of  the  great  portrait  that  it 
makes  its  subject  always  a  great  man.  It  brings  out 
the  fact  that  every  man  is  great  if  viewed  from  the 
sympathetic  point  of  view — great,  that  is,  not  in  the 
amount  of  actions  done,  but  in  the  power  of  waking 
interest.  It  brings  out,  in  fact,  in  what  way  its 
subject  is  "  typical,"  since  great  art  is  above  all  things 
generous,  like  the  strong  and  merciful  light  of  the 
sun  that  will  render  lovable  the  meanest  fields,  the 
barest  walls. 

And  such  a  great  portrait  as  this  is  notable  as 
explaining  what  must  be,  always,  the  artist's  ambition 
— that  his  work  shall  look  "  not  like  a  picture." 
When  one  stands  before  it  one  is  not  conscious  of  a 
break  in  atmospheric  space  :  one  does  not  subcon- 
sciously say  :  "  Here  the  air  of  the  room  ends  :  here 
is  the  commencement  of  the  picture's  atmosphere." 
70 


0/ 


HOLBEIN 


The  figures  in  the  picture  are  figures  in  the  room. 
It  is  not,  of  course,  a  matter  of  a  Pre-Raphaelite 
attempt  to  "  deceive  the  eye  "  by  a  kind  of  stippHng 
as  if  the  painter  had  attempted  with  cuttle-fish  to 
smooth  out  the  traces  of  his  tool,  for  the  tool  is 
frankly  accepted  and  the  brush  marks  visible  enough. 

The  large,  plain  woman,  with  the  unattractive 
children,  lives  before  us,  luminous,  throwing  back 
the  light  with  that  subdued  quality  of  reflection 
that  all  human  flesh  possesses.  She  is  an  entity  that 
one  cannot  question  ;  she  is  not  so  much  a  type  as 
a  representative  of  the  womanhood  of  a  whole  race. 
She  is,  I  mean,  not  an  allegorical  figure  representing 
"  United  Motherhood  of  the  Teutonic  Family "  ; 
she  is  an  individual  mother  who  will  make  us  think 
of  the  troubles  of  maternity.  What  is  typical  in 
the  picture  is  her  quiescence.  She  is  not  represented 
as  washing,  feeding  her  children,  or  scolding.  As  an 
individual  figure  she  is  given  in  as  "  all  round  "  a 
mood  as  was  possible  :  in  a  period  of  reverie  she  is 
thinking  of  actions  to  come  or  of  actions  past. 

One  so  exhausts  superlatives  in  these  days  that 
there  seem  to  be  none  left  in  which  to  speak  of  the 
almost  perfect  drawing  of  the  woman's  shoulders  and 
head,  of  the  harmony  of  the  whole  design,  on 
whose  surface,  or  rather  in  whose  depths,  the  eye 
travels  so  pleasantly  from  place  to  place.  The  woman's 
hands  are  particularly  worth  looking  at — the  masterly 
way  in  which  the  one  on  the  boy's  shoulder  shows  in 
its  lines  that  it  rests  heavily,  and  the  way  in  which  the 
pressure  on  the  baby's  waist  is  indicated. 

This  great  work  was  painted  in  oil  colours  on  paper 
which  has  since  been  cut  out  along  the  outlines  of 
the  figures  and  affixed  to  a  panel.  It  was  the  work  of 
1528-29,  when  Holbein  was  once  more  in  Basle.  He 
had  bought  himself  a  house  and  perhaps  had  designs 

71 


HOLBEIN 

of  settling  down  in  the  Swiss  town  for  good.  He  seems 
to  have  found  employment  mainly  in  designs  for 
printers  and  jewellers,  though  the  small  round  painting 
of  Erasmus  at  Basle  and  the  similar  portrait  of  Melanc- 
thon  now  in  Hanover  appear  to  belong  to  this  period. 
1529  was  the  year  of  the  greatest  tribulation  for  Swiss 
painters;  nevertheless  in  1530  the  Basle  Town  Council 
commissioned  Holbein  to  continue  his  decorations  of 
the  town  hall.  The  frescoes  themselves  have  vanished, 
but,  to  account  for  them,  we  have  the  drawing  of 
Rehohoam  and  the  magnificent  Samuel  and  Saul,  which 
is  to  my  mind  the  finest  of  all  Holbein's  quasi-decorative 
subject  pictures. 

The  way  in  which,  in  this  drawing,  the  figures  of  the 
marching  troops,  of  the  king,  and  of  the  arresting 
prophet  are  rendered  actual,  and  at  the  same  time 
blended  into  one  composition  with  the  strictly  decora- 
tive scroll-work  of  smoke  from  the  blazing  background, 
proves  that  Holbein  had  at  this  time  reached  the  very 
high-water  mark  of  genius — of  genius  which  is  the  com- 
prehension of  the  scope  possible  to  a  certain  class  of 
design.  It  is  decoration  achieved,  not  by  the  multi- 
plication of  arbitrary  details  and  not  by  the  arbitrary 
treatment  o^  actual  forms,  but  by  the  selection  of 
natural  objects  fitted  to  fill  and  to  make  beautiful  a 
certain  space.  It  is  the  sort  of  selection  that  is  given 
to  most  of  us  at  rare  moments.  Thus  I  remember 
seeing,  whilst  I  was  making  a  final  tour  for  the  purposes 
of  this  book,  a  number  of  workmen  taking  a  siesta 
along  the  bottom  of  a  sunlit  wall.  There  may  have 
been  thirty  of  them,  in  various  but  similar  attitudes, 
on  the  ground,  and  nearly  all  of  them  wore  blue  blouses. 
This  similarity  of  their  attitudes  and  costumes  and  the 
straight  line  that  they  made  brought  to  my  lips  at 
once  the  words  :  "  If  only  Holbein  had  seen 
that  !  "  I  suppose  that  I  had  my  mind  full  of  the 
72 


By  permission  of  Messrs.  Broun,  Clement. 


Han/staeH? 


UNIVLrtSIl 


HOLBEIN 

little  frieze  of  Dancing  Peasants  that  there  is  In  the 
Basle  Museum. 

But  with  these  decorations  of  the  council  chamber 
the  possibilities  of  work  for  Holbein  in  Basle  seem  to 
have  been  exhausted.  It  is  true  that  he  was  given 
the  painting  of  a  town  clock  and  paid  rather  extrava- 
gantly for  the  work.  But  Erasmus,  Amerbach,  and 
the  other  Humanists  had  shaken  from  their  feet  the 
dust  of  a  city  given  up  apparently  to  tragic  icono- 
clasts, and  for  Basle,  as  for  Italy,  it  might  be  said 
that  that  lustre  1525-30  saw  the  end  of  the  Renais- 
sance. That  particularly  good  old  time  had  come  to 
an  end. 

It  was  natural  that  Holbein  should  seek  to  recapture 
what  he  could  of  it — to  chase  westward  the  glimmer  of 
that  setting  sun.  So  he  returned  to  England.  He 
left  his  family  apparently  well  provided  for  :  his  chil- 
dren at  least  seem  to  have  kept  their  heads  very  well 
above  water.  Subsequently  the  Basle  Town  Council 
did  their  best  to  induce  him  to  return.  They  offered 
him,  as  did  Venice  to  Diirer,  a  rather  princely  retaining 
fee,  stipulating  only  that  he  should  reside  for  a  part  of 
each  year  in  the  city.  Holbein  appears  to  have  thought 
of  accepting  the  offer,  but  he  had  not  yet  done  so 
when,  ten  years  later,  the  plague  cut  short  his  days  in 
London. 

His  career  subsequent  to  his  coming  to  this  country 
is  fairly  deducible.  More,  his  patron,  and  Lord 
Chancellor  of  the  kingdom,  fell  very  soon  after  Holbein 
arrived  and  before  he  could  benefit  the  painter  at  all. 
A  set  of  new  men  became  all-powerful  with  the  coming 
of  Thomas  Cromwell,  and,  for  a  time  at  least,  Holbein 
could  do  little  to  attract  their  notice.  It  was  then, 
apparently,  that  he  set  himself  to  gain  the  patronage 
of  the  Merchants  of  the  Steelyard,  a  corporation 
of  Germans  securely  established  in  London,  men 

73 


HOLBEIN 


most  of  them  of  great  wealth,  and  no  doubt  of  some 
taste. 

So  Holbein  painted  the  celebrated  portrait  of 
George  Gisze.  I  must  confess  that  it  leaves  me  rather 
cold.  The  man  himself  is  wonderfully  painted  and 
the  colour  of  the  whole  picture  is  fresh  and  attractive. 
So,  too,  each  of  the  too  many  accessories  is  brilliantly 
put  upon  the  canvas.  But  it  is  in  consequence  difficult 
to  see  the  wood  for  the  trees,  and  Holbein  is  guilty 
of  wrenching  the  hands  of  Gisze  into  an  unnatural 
attitude  in  order  that  the  spectator  may  read  the 
superscription  of  the  letter  the  merchant  holds. 
Nevertheless,  though  the  whole  picture  be  a  feat  of  an 
inartistic  kind,  it  is  none  the  less  a  feat  that  we  may 
feel  glad  to  have  beheld.  For,  as  Dr.  Johnson 
says  in  a  passage  that  I  remember  but  cannot 
recapture,  it  enlarges  our  ideas  of  what  mankind 
can  do  if  we  witness  some  such  achievement  of  leger- 
demain as  seeing  sixteen  balls  kept  in  the  air  by 
one  man. 

The  picture  served  its  purpose  in  attracting  the 
custom  of  other  merchants  of  the  Steelyard,  many  of 
whom  remain  immortalized  in  galleries  throughout 
Europe.  Those  at  Vienna  and  Berlin  are  notably 
fine,  and  we  have  reason  to  be  thankful  that  in  the 
matter  of  detail  Holbein  did  not  keep  these  later  works 
up  to  the  sample  of  the  George  Gisze. 

The  subsequent  career  of  Holbein  was  one  of  steady 
work  and  of  steady  rise  in  the  world.  We  find  him 
very  soon  painting  the  portrait  of  Cheseman,  the  king's 
falconer,  and  very  soon  afterwards  those  of  the  greater 
courtiers.  It  is  customary  to  conjecture  that  he  owed 
this  latter  employment  to  the  patronage  of  some 
particular  eminent  personage.  I  think  we  might  be 
content  to  ascribe  it  to  the  eminence  of  his  gifts  in 
portraiture  in  an  age  when  the  rich  and  powerful 

74 


TV  0^  n  UNuis 


HOLBEIN 


were  particularly  anxious  to  have  memorials  of  them- 
selves, and  to  his  skill  in  designing  jewellery  in  an  age 
when  the  sovereign  as  part  of  a  settled  policy  was 
ruining  his  great  nobles  by  forcing  them  to  a  lavish 
expenditure. 

But,  if  it  be  necessary  to  ascribe  his  rise  to  any  one 
patron,  we  have  the  man  to  our  hands  in  Thomas 
Cromwell,  then  already  all-powerful,  and  then  already 
in  contact  with  those  Germans  the  ultimate  alliance 
with  whom  was  to  cause  his  downfall.  At  that  time 
Cromwell  was  wildly  lavish  in  expending,  upon  what 
we  should  now  call  articles  of  virtu,  the  enormous 
sums  that  were  at  his  disposal  in  the  way  of  bribes 
and  peculations  from  the  monasteries  that  he  was 
dissolving.  His  agents  all  over  Europe  were  engaged 
in  looking  out  for  him  the  most  elaborate  of  Flemish 
furniture,  the  most  costly  works  of  goldsmiths,  pictures, 
and  globes  of  the  earth.  When  he  could  he  duplicated 
these  purchases,  retaining  one  example  for  the  collec- 
tion that  he  was  making,  that  his  son  Gregory  might 
become  a  great  lord.  The  duplicate  he  presented  to 
the  king,  whom  he  kept  as  far  as  he  could  in  a  good 
humour  with  almost  daily  gifts. 

Considering  how  elaborate  was  his  system  of  spies, 
it  would  have  been  difficult  for  Cromwell  to  remain 
in  ignorance  of  Holbein's  existence  in  the  land  ;  and 
considering  his  tastes  and  necessities,  it  would  have 
been  strange  had  he  neglected  to  use  the  painter.  We 
find  him  actually  writing  Holbein's  name  early  in 
February  1538,  when,  after  the  death  of  Jane  Seymour, 
Philip  Hoby  was  sent  about  Europe  to  inspect  marriage- 
able princesses  : 

Instruccions  given  hy  the  Lord  Cromwell  to  Phtlip 
Hoby  sent  over  hy  him  to  the  dutchesse  of  Loreigne  and 
after  to  the  dutchesse  of  Millane,  ,  .  . 

.  .  .  Then  shall  he  desire  to  know  her  (Christina 

75. 


HOLBEIN 

of  Milan)  pleaser  when  Mr  Hanns  shall  comme  to 
her  for  the  doing  of  his  feat  in  the  taking  of  her 
picture.  And  so  hauinge  the  time  appointed  he  shall 
go  with  him  or  tarrie  behind  as  she  shall  appointe." 

The  result  of  this  journey  was  of  course  the  matchless 
portrait — but  the  "  feat  "  was  not  as  remarkable  as 
one  serious  historian  avers  ;  he  did  not  "  finish  his 
picture  in  three  hours,"  though  probably  he  spent 
no  more  over  the  small  sketch  which  he  made  in 
this  as  in  all  other  cases,  and  no  doubt  he  finished 
the  picture,  either  in  London  or  Brussels,  from 
memory.  Holbein  was  by  that  time  ofiicial  painter 
to  Henry  VHI.  It  has  been  conjectured  that  he 
was  exhorted  by  Cromwell  to  flatter  Anne  of  Cleves 
in  the  portrait  of  that  lady.  The  portrait  shows 
a  princess  by  no  means  ill-favoured — but  we  have 
historical  evidence  to  prove  that  Anne  was  really 
considered  beautiful  by  her  countrymen,  and  we 
have  not  any  particular  evidence  that  proves  that 
even  Henry  considered  her  repulsive  except  for 
reasons  of  State. 

At  any  rate,  to  the  extent  that  the  portrait  had  an 
influence,  Holbein  was  an  actor  in  History  in  the 
Large.  It  was  in  or  about  1536  that  he  had  been 
made  painter  royal.  In  that  year  he  painted  the 
portrait  of  the  Queen  Jane  Seymour  ;  soon  after,  the 
fresco  of  Henries  VII  and  VIII  with  their  Queens  ; 
soon  after,  he  designed  the  Jane  Seymour  cup.  He 
continued  making  portraits  and  designs  until  his  death 
by  the  plague  in  November  1543.  Even  after  his 
death  a  design  of  his  came  as  a  New  Year  offering  to 
the  king.  His  will  shows  that  he  left  some  illegitimate 
children  ;  stray  letters  show  that  he  had  a  few  friends 
in  London  ;  the  Record  Office  documents  show  that 
he  drew  his  salary  habitually  in  advance — as  thus, 
from  the  King's  Payments  : 

76 


HOLBEIN 


"  Apl.   1540.    Hans  Holhyn  the  K's  Painter  in 

advancement  of  his  wages  for  one  half  year  beforehand 
since  Michaelmas  last,  15.  li. 

"  Mich.  1540.  Hans  Holbyn :  nihil  quia  prius 
warrantum.^^ 

And  so  as  a  personality  he  passes  out  of  the  historian's 
ken. 


77 


VII 


I OPENED  this  little  monograph  with  a  pseudo- 
comparison  of  Diirer  with  Holbein  :  of  course 
the  two  are  not  comparable.  For  if,  to  con- 
tinue the  use  of  a  simile  of  my  first  page,  Holbein 
be  a  mountain  peak  in  a  chain  of  hills,  we  must  write 
Diirer  down  as  a  Titanic  cloud  form,  one  of  a  range 
that  on  a  clear  day  we  may  see  towering  up  behind 
the  mountain.  The  two  men  diifer  in  kind  and 
in  species.  Holbein  could  no  more  have  conceived 
the  Great  Fortune  than  Diirer  could  have  painted 
the  Christina  of  Milan  :  Diirer  could  not  refrain 
from  commenting  upon  life,  Holbein's  comments 
were  of  little  importance. 

That  essentially  was  the  ultimate  difference  between 
the  two  :  it  is  a  serviceable  thing  to  state,  since  in 
trying  to  ascertain  the  characteristics  of  a  man  it  is 
as  useful  to  state  what  he  is  not  as  what  he  is.  Diirer, 
then,  had  imagination  where  Holbein  had  only  vision 
and  invention — an  invention  of  a  rough-shod  and 
everyday  kind.  But,  perhaps  for  that  very  reason, 
the  subjects  of  Holbein's  brush — in  his  portraits — 
are  seen  as  it  were  through  a  glass  more  limpid.  To 
put  it  with  exaggerated  clearness  :  we  may  believe 
in  what  Holbein  painted,  but  in  looking  at  Diirer's 
work  we  can  never  be  quite  assured  that  he  is  an  un- 
prejudiced transcriber.  You  will  get  the  comparison 
emphasized  if  you  will  compare  Holbein's  drawing 
of  Henry  VIII  with  the  etching  by  Cornells  Matsys 

78 


"-UNOli 


HOLBEIN 

of|the  year  1543.  The  drawing  is  an  unconcerned 
rendering  of  an  appallingly  gross  and  miserable  man  ; 
the  etching  seems  as  if,  with  every  touch  of  his  tool, 
the  artist  had  been  stabbing  in  little  exclamation  notes 
of  horror.  The  drawing  leaves  one  thinking  that  no 
man  could  be  more  ugly  than  Henry ;  the  etching 
forces  one  to  think  that  no  artist  could  imagine  any 
man  more  obscene. 

Holbein,  in  fact,  was  a  great  Renderer.  If  I  wanted 
to  find  a  figure  really  akin  to  his  I  think  I  should  go 
to  music  and  speak  of  Bach.  For  in  Bach  you  have 
just  that  peculiar  Teutonic  type  of  which  Holbein  is  so 
great  an  example  :  in  the  musician  too  you  have  that 
marvellous  mastery  of  the  instrument,  that  composure, 
that  want  of  striving.  And  both  move  one  by  what 
musicians  call  "  absolute  "  means.  Just  as  the  fourth 
fugue  of  the  "  Wohltemperierte  Klavier  "  is  profoundly 
moving — for  no  earthly  reason  that  one  knows — so 
is  the  portrait  of  Holbein's  family.  The  fugue  is 
beautiful  in  spite  of  a  relatively  ugly  "  subject," 
the  portrait  is  beyond  praise  in  spite  of  positively 
ugly  sitters.  And  there  is  in  neither  anything  ex- 
traneous :  the  fugue,  unaided  by  "  programme," 
is  pure  music  ;  the  portrait,  unaided  by  literary  ideas, 
is  simply  painting. 

The  quality  of  the  enjoyment  that  we  can  get 
from  the  works  of  these  two  is  also  very  precisely 
identical.  I  do  not  know  how  long  the  DuL^  of 
Norfolk's  portrait  of  Christina  of  Milan  has  hung 
in  the  National  Gallery  :  it  must  have  been  there 
many  years,  since  I  can  hardly  remember  a  "  myself  " 
in  which  the  idea  of  that  "  symphony  "  in  blues  and 
blacks  did  not  play  an  integral  part  of  my  pleasures. 
I  would  rather  possess  that  painting  than  any  other 
object  in  the  world,  I  think,  and  I  have  visited  the 
National  Gallery,  I  do  not  know  how  many  times, 

79 


HOLBEIN 

simply  to  stand  in  front  of  it — simply  to  stand  and  to 
think  nothing.  It  is  not  for  me  a  picture  ;  it  is  not 
even  a  personage  with  whom  I  am  in  love.  But 
simply  a  mood — a  mood  of  profound  lack  of  thought, 
of  profound  self-forgetfulness,  which  assuredly  is  the 
most  blessed  thing  which  Art,  in  this  rather  weary 
world,  can  vouchsafe  to  a  man — descends  upon  me 
in  front  of  that  combination  of  paints  upon  that 
canvas. 

It  is  not  merely  this  portrait  that  can  evoke  this 
mood  in  us — it  is  the  very  quality  of  Holbein.  I 
happen  to  possess  a  very  excellent  set  of  reproductions 
— made  for  a  private  person — of  the  series  of  Windsor 
sketches  for  portraits.  One  can  pass  hours  with  such 
things  as  these  on  the  floor  before  one's  chair.  Here 
is  the  court  of  Henry  VIII,  from  the  Groom  Falconer 
to  the  Earl  Marshal.  But  it  is  not  the  former  careers 
of  the  dead  queens,  the  tiny  features  of  the  little  prince, 
or  the  heavy  jowl  and  weary  eyes  of  the  most  unhappy 
king — ^it  is  not  the  history,  the  intrigue,  the  gossip 
of  a  small  kingdom  then  barbaric  and  insignificant 
enough.  Here  is  Regina  Anna  Bulleyn ;  but  this  is 
not  the  queen  who  was  done  to  death  by  false  witnesses. 
A  comely,  large-featured,  slightly  sardonic  face  looks 
down  not  very  intently  upon  a  book.  But  it  is  neither 
queen  nor  face  that  holds  those  of  us  who  are  attuned 
to  the  quality  that  we  call  "  Holbein  "  :  it  is  a  certain 
collocation  of  lines,  of  masses. 

We  are,  literally,  in  love  with  this  arrangement  of 
lines,  of  lights  and  of  shadows.  The  eye  is  held 
by  no  object,  but  solely  by  the  music  of  the  pattern 
— the  quality  that  we  call  "  Holbein."  It  is  a 
quality  ;  it  is  a  feeling ;  it  is  a  method  of  projection 
that  one  admires — and  that  one  might  well  speak  of 
in  the  peculiar  phraseology  that  is  reserved  for  one's 
admiration  of  musicians.  Thus  when  one  asks  another, 
80 


OF  THE 
UMVE.'^SITV  OF  IL LfNOli 


HOLBEIN 


"  Do  you  like  Beethoven  ?  "  he  implies,  not  "  Do  you 
like  an  old,  sardonic,  deaf  man  ?  "  or  "  Do  you  like 
the  Ninth  Symphony  or  any  other  individual  work  ?  " 
• — but  "  Are  you  pleasurably  affected  when  the  name 
Beethoven  calls  up  in  you  certain  emotions — emotions 
that  you  have  felt  when  certain  notes  followed  certain 
others  in  an  intangible  sequence  ;  a  sequence  that 
cannot  be  analysed,  but  which  is  '  Beethoven '  ?  " 

The  quality,  the  power  of  Holbein  is  similar. 
When  we  recall  him  to  mind,  no  particular  work 
of  his "  sticks  out  "  in  the  mind's  eye.  He  is  a  mass, 
or  a  force  ;  he  calls  up  a  mood. 

This  characteristic  is  most  marked  when  one  con- 
siders the  work  that  he  did  after  his  final  establishment 
in  England.  One  may  use  a  cliche  phrase  so  that  it 
becomes,  in  this  case,  vivid  and  actual :  he  poured  out  a 
stream  of  pictures.  They  are  better  or  worse  than  each 
other  only  in  accordance  with  the  beholder's  private  pre- 
ferences ;  just  as,  in  a  stream,  different  men  standing 
at  different  points  on  the  bank  and  seeing  different 
facets  of  the  ripples  see  differing  lights  and  shadows 
differing.  You  may  above  all  things  care  for  the 
Ambassadors,  which  moves  me  very  little  ;  I  shall 
never  be  contented  with  praise  of  the  Duke  of  Norfolk 
of  Windsor,  or  the  Unbekannte  Dame  of  Vienna.  Yet, 
in  the  mass  and  after  the  review,  you  and  I  may  both 
set  the  abstraction  we  call  "  Holbein  "  at  the  same  very 
high  level. 

He  has  always  seemed  to  me  to  be  the  earliest  of 
"  modern  "  painters — to  have  looked  at  men  and 
women,  first  of  all,  with  the  "  modern  "  eye.  If  you 
glance  rapidly  along  the  series  of  sketches  at  Windsor 
you  will  be  astounded  to  see  how  exactly  they  resemble 
the  faces  you  will  pass  in  the  Windsor  streets.  If  you 
compare  them  with,  say,  Lely's  portraits  of  a  later 
court,  the  characteristic  becomes  even  more  marked, 

F  8i 


HOLBEIN 


since  Lely's  men  and  women  died  a  century  or  so 
later  than  Holbein's — and  have  yet  been  dead  so  much 
longer.  He  got  out  of  his  time — as  he  got  into  our 
time — with  a  completeness  that  few  painters  have 
achieved — hardly  even  Velasquez  or  Rembrandt. 

The  claim  is  not,  really,  a  very  high  one  :  the  modern 
eye  looking  at  things  in  a  rather  humdrum  and  unin- 
spired way.  But,  of  course,  the  praise  appears  more 
high  if  we  put  it  that  Holbein's  works  may  be  said  to 
have  compelled  us  to  look  at  things  as  we  do,  just  as, 
after  Palestrina,  the  ears  of  men  grew  gradually 
accustomed  to  hear  music  only  in  the  modern  modes. 
Artistically  speaking,  it  means  that  Holbein,  pene- 
trating, as  it  were,  through  the  disguise  of  costume, 
of  hair-dressing,  and  of  the  very  postures  of  the  body 
and  droop  of  the  eyelids,  seized  on  the  rounded  per- 
sonalities— the  underlying  truths — of  the  individuals 
before  him  ;  so  that  when  one  looks  at  the  portrait  of 
de  Morett,  or  the  wonderful  sketch  of  a  dark  girl 
with  a  figure  that  rakes  back,  one  neither  notices  the 
clothes  of  the  one  nor  the  absence  of  clothes  of  the 
other,  ^sthetically,  of  course,  the  painting  of  the 
clothes  and  ornaments  has  a  value  of  its  own — in  the 
portrait  of  de  Morett  it  leads  up  to  and  supports 
the  heavy  and  sagacious  face — but,  until  we  consciously 
examine  it  for  our  own  aesthetic  ends,  we  are  not 
really  aware  of  the  clothes  at  all,  and  the  figure 
before  us  might  be  that  of  any  prime  minister,  plumber, 
or  book  publisher  of  to-day. 

It  is  only  in  the  "  display  "  portraits — the  George 
Gisze  type  of  which  I  have  spoken  despitefuUy  at  some 
length — that  the  "  human  interest  "  sinks  into  the 
background.  And  even  these  might  have  been  satis- 
fying works  of  art  had  Holbein  been  content  to  take 
hold  of  absolutely  the  other  end  of  the  stick — I  mean, 
had  he  been  content  absolutely  to  subordinate  the 
82 


HantsLan 


HOLBEIN 

portrait  of  the  man  to  the  painting  of  the  accessories  ; 
so  that,  as  it  were,  we  should  have  had  a  portrait  of  an 
inkpot  and  a  carnation  with  a  background  of  Gisze. 

Such  a  feat  would  have  been  nothing  to  Holbein. 
In  his  earlier — but  not  earliest — decorative  designs, 
in  such  a  piece  as  the  Man  of  Sorrows  of  the  Basle 
diptych,  he  balanced  very  fairly  the  accessories  of 
pillar  and  arch  with  the  human  figure.  In  this,  be  it 
admitted,  neither  the  figure  nor  the  accessories  are 
conceived  in  a  plane  of  "  actuality  "  ;  they  remain 
in  that  half-dreamland  which  is  the  decorative  world, 
whilst  the  George  Gisze  portrait  belongs  to  that 
mood  of  Holbein  which  has  been  called  his  most 
realistic. 

In  the  last  phase  of  his  painting  the  former  type  of 
work  sank  absolutely  into  the  background,  and  in  the 
wonderful  series  of  portraits  that  are  our  Holbein, 
neither  in  the  background  nor  in  the  fore  does  there 
appear  any  trace  of  that  Renaissance  luxuriousness 
that,  in  his  earlier  pictures,  filled  us  with  amazement 
and  respect  for  his  fertility  of  invention.  The 
columns  and  the  cherubs  have  gone  together  from 
the  picture.  But  when  one  looks  in  museums  and 
discovers  such  masterpieces  as  the  title-page  portrait  of 
Erasmus  with  the  god  Terminus  one  realizes  how  much 
Holbein  has  mended  and  how  little  altered  his  ways. 
The  painting  of  the  portrait  comes  as  near  Renaissance 
perfection  as  any  Suabian  could  be  expected  to  attain. 
Diirer,  as  I  have  said,  abandoned  Renaissance  ideas 
because  they  were  pagan  :  Holbein  dropped  them  out 
of  his  canvases  because  the  actual  world  as  he  saw  it 
no  longer  had  a  place  for  them.  But  in  the  particular 
realm  where  his  fancy  had  a  legitimate  scope  and 
unlimited  plains  on  which  to  perform  gambados  and 
demivolts  he  pursued  the  loves  of  his  childhood  into 
all  sorts  of  skyey  distances.    He  refined  until  the  least 

83 


HOLBEIN 


sympathetic  must  admire  ;  he  invented  until  our 
wonder  at  his  powers  of  invention  melts  into  a  nearly 
perfect  sympathy. 

In  these  decorative  feats  of  his — his  designs  for 
bands  of  gold,  his  dagger-sheaths,  his  loving-cups — 
his  is  the  braver  spirit  of  the  two  main  streams  of 
"  decoration."  His  spirit — and  it  is,  of  course,  the 
primitive  and  the  pagan — impelled  him  to  cover 
every  inch  of  his  surface  with  ornament,  to  tighten 
the  screw  more  and  more  and  more  in  that  prodigal 
direction.  There  must  be  always  more  cherubs,  more 
vine  leaves,  more  foxes,  more  grapes,  until  even  the 
original,  sinuous  main  design  of  branch  and  stem  is 
cut  into  and  vanishes.  Thus  the  general  effect  of  one 
of  his  designs  for  dagger-sheaths  is  almost  that  of 
the  pebbles  that  tessellate  the  bottoms  of  certain  trout 
streams.  The  eye  follows  lines  along  them  and  is 
agreeably  diverted  without  fixing  upon  any  one  point, 
main  current,  or  figure.  The  same  tendency  accounts 
for  what  pleasure  one  feels  in  looking  at  such  a  tour 
de  force  as  the  woodcut  of  the  celebrated  ^able  of 
Cebes,  Here  it  is  true  Holbein  presents  us  with  all 
the  incidents  of  a  Pilgrim's  Progress ;  but  considered 
as  realism  "  the  page  has  no  value,  and  allegorically 
it  is  unimpressive.  The  total  effect,  the  look,"  of 
the  whole  thing  is  nevertheless  agreeable. 

Nothing  was  further  from  Holbein's  spirit — and 
nothing  indeed  is  further  from  the  spirit  of  his  nation 
and  age — than  any  idea  that  great  results  can  be 
obtained  with  small  means.  He  belonged  to  a  nation 
to  whom  display  was  and  remains  the  readiest  means 
of  indicating  value  of  whatever  sort.  Simplicity  and 
severity  were  probably  distasteful  enough  to  him. 
Thus  nothing  could  have  been  further  from  his  sym- 
pathy than  what  is  best  in  modern  decorative  art, 
and  he  had  little  or  no  idea,  beyond  that  enforced 

84 


HOLBEIN 

by  the  exigencies  of  space,  of  adapting  his  design  to 
the  form  of  the  object  to  be  decorated  or  of  reducing 
the  amount  of  ornament  further  and  further  until 
the  best  decorated  space  be  that  which  contains  the 
least  ornament.  His  dukes  would  never  have  been  the 
worst  dressed  men  of  a  House  of  Peers. 

His  is  the  other  end  of  our  line,  in  this  as  in  so  many 
other  things,  and  to  appreciate  him  thoroughly  we 
have  to  make  mental  efforts  of  one  kind  and  another. 
As  we  might  put  it,  he  was  vulgar,  which  we  are  not, 
but  he  had  more  blood  and  more  hope,  so  that  he 
achieved  the  impossible  so  many  times,  and  climbing 
in  places  where  we  are  accustomed  to  say  that  climbing 
is  wrong  or  hopeless,  he  appears  on  peaks  more  high 
than  any  of  ours.  That,  of  course,  is  what  the  master 
does  in  the  realm  of  the  arts. 

I  have  employed  freely  the  words  "  actual  "  and 
"  realist  "  in  speaking  of  Holbein's  work,  and  in  that 
I  have  followed  the  example  of  many  who  use  the 
terms  either  panegyrically  or  in  contempt.  But  in 
the  modern  sense  he  was  little  of  a  realist,  dealing 
rather  in  the  typical.  One  can  exemplify  this  best 
in  such  drawings  as  the  very  beautiful  and  celebrated 
ship  "  design.  Our  present-day  realist  "  would 
give  us  some  moment  from  the  career  of  some  actual 
ship.  But  Holbein's  is  hardly  an  actual  ship  at  all. 
It  can  hardly  have  been  drawn  from  the  life,  since, 
even  in  that  day  when  ships  absurdly  unmanageable, 
top-heavy,  and  unsteerable  made  voyages  the  mere  idea 
of  which  turns  the  hair  of  the  modern  sailor  grey — 
even  in  that  day  no  ship  so  absolutely  unballasted 
would  have  set  sail  from  any  port.  But  Holbein 
had  got  into  his  head,  had  made  part  of  his  ideas,  a 
representative  ship.  He  had  seen  ships  perhaps  at 
Lyons,  perhaps  in  the  Channel,  and  he  evolved  from 
his  mind  a  typical  form.    Equally,  too,  he  had  seen 


HOLBEIN 

ships  set  sail,  had  seen  men  being  seasick,  had  seen 
fat  warrior-sailors  on  board  embracing  fat  women,  had 
seen  bumboats  casting  off,  had  seen  pots  of  beer  handed 
up  to  a  masthead  and  gigantic  standard-bearers  casting 
loose  their  flags  to  the  breeze.  But  in  bringing  all  these 
things  together  into  his  design  he  overwhelms  one  with 
the  idea  that  he  could  never,  upon  any  one  setting  sail 
of  a  ship,  have  seen  so  much  at  one  moment.  Thus, 
admirable  and  actual  as  each  detail  of  the  drawing  is, 
it  impresses  one  not  as  a  realistic  shadowing  of  any 
incident,  but  as  an  almost  didactic  portrayal  of  what 
it  might  be  possible  to  see.  It  is  as  if  he  wished  to 
show  men  of  the  inlands  who  had  never  seen  a  ship 
as  much  as  possible  in  one  drawing. 

Of  course  his  real  purpose  may  have  been  no  more 
than  a  note  to  remind  himself,  as  in  the  case  of  the 
Bat  and  Lamb  drawings.  But  that  semi-didactic 
spirit  is  visible  in  much  else  of  his  work.  It  seems  to 
fill  the  Dance  of  Death  series,  which,  as  it  were,  exclaims 
continually,  "  See  what  Death  can  do  !  "  And  it 
is  the  "  real  "  note  of  all  his  portraits.  Whilst  going 
to  the  bottom  of  each  individual,  whilst  absolutely 
searching  out  his  most  usable  qualities,  he  seems  to 
be  selecting  those  saliences  which  will  make  the  in- 
dividual really  noticeable.  Diirer  wrote  upon  his 
drawings  :  "  This  is  how  the  Knights  rode  in  armour 
in  15 15."  Holbein  tries  to  force  us  to  see  in  his 
portrait  of  the  Lady  Parker  :  "  This  is  how  women 
of  the  narrow-eyed,  small-nosed,  wide-mouthed,  tiny- 
waisted  type  looked  in  the  year  1537."  Or,  in  an 
exaggerated  form  the  George  Gisze  shows  us  the 
merchant  with  all  his  arms  around  him. 

This  last  is,  of  course,  merely  material — but  it  is  a 
material  indication  of  the  artist's'psychological  approach 
to  his  sitters.  He  does  not,  as  I  have  said,  take  them 
in  their  "  moments,"  he  does  not  show  them  under 
86 


LIBRA  .V 
OF  THE 
UNlVEnCITY  OF  IL 


HOLBEIN 

violent  lights  or  in  the  grasp  of  strong  passions.  He 
rounds  them  off,  catching  them  always  at  moments 
when  the  illumination,  both  of  the  actual  atmosphere 
and  of  their  souls,  was  transfused  and  shone  all  round 
them.  Thus  he  has  left  us  a  picture  of  his  world, 
as  it  were,  upon  a  grey  day. 

Other  artists  are  giving  us  more  light,  others  again 
have  given  us  both  more  light  and  more  shadow,  or 
more  shadow  alone.  But  no  other  artist  has  left 
a  more  sincere  rendering  of  his  particular  world, 
and  no  other  artist's  particular  world  is  compact 
of  simulacra  more  convincing,  more  illusory,  or  more 
calculated  to  hold  our  attentions.  He  has  redeemed 
a  whole  era  for  us  from  oblivion,  and  he  has  forced  us 
to  believe  that  his  vision  of  it  was  the  only  feasible 
one.  This  is  all  that  the  greatest  of  Art  can  do, 
whether  it  takes  us  into  a  world  of  the  artist's  fancy 
or  into  one  of  his  fellow-men.  And  by  rescuing 
from  oblivion  these  past  eras  it  confers  upon  us, 
to  the  extent  of  its  hold,  a  portion  of  that  herb  oblivion, 
a  portion  of  that  forgetfulness  of  our  own  selves,  which 
is  the  best  gift  that  Art  has  to  bestow. 


